God Is the Greatest Fiction Ever

Question 1:

A very simple principle has to be understood. If you lie once, then you will have to lie a thousand and one times to protect the first lie. Still it remains unprotected; those one thousand and one lies cannot make it a truth. They may repress it, but it is there. And in fact they are all lies, so every lie, in its own turn, needs again protection. And you cannot protect a lie by any truth.

Truth needs no protection. When you speak the truth it is self-evident, complete. Nothing else is needed, no support. It has its authenticity in itself. The lie is empty. It has no evidence. But you can befool people by telling a series of lies. Perhaps one they may find out, but when thousands of lies are told, it is very difficult to find out in this crowd the basic lie. God is the basic lie - so basic that it needs thousands of theologies in the world to protect it. Still it is not protected. Still God is not self-evident. Still it needs proof, still no argument is enough. All arguments are found to be illogical.

Yes, they can convince somebody who is already convinced. But there is no point in convincing a person who is already convinced, who has accepted, believed. He needs no argumentation about it, no proofs. But all your arguments about God, and proofs, have not been able to convert a single atheist in the whole history of humanity. This is something to be thought about. And then, because you have spoken the basic lie, now you have to surround it, cloud it, with many more lies.

The story of the devil seducing Eve and Adam, and the fall of humanity: these are supporting lies.

But it's very interesting to go into them, interesting to see the cunningness of the so-called messiahs, avataras, and the so-called theologians. Before I enter into this story I would like you to know the full version. Generally the full version is not known. Only half the story is being told, because the other half became inconvenient.

Adam and Eve were not the first to be created by God. The real story is that Eve was a second thought. God had created one woman, but it was not Eve. Adam and one woman he created. When I look at the story, it is very revealing. He created man and woman, but he must have been - and he was - a Jewish God. It is a Jewish story, and he must have been a perfect Jew: he created only one bed, so small that even for one person it was not comfortable. It was impossible to put the man and woman together on that small bed. So the first night - the honeymoon night - turned into a nightmare. The first fight was, "Who is going to sleep on the bed?"

Of course the man was very male chauvinistic, but it was not yet proved that he is superior in any way, and there was no precedent; they were the first ones. The woman was very reluctant; she said she is going to sleep on the bed. The whole night they quarreled - the first encounter group: pillow fight and... and the next day God had to withdraw that woman. Since then the real woman has not existed.

To me, even a fictitious story can be used to search into the mind who created it. The real woman had to be withdrawn. Then Eve was created, but not as an independent being; she was created out of a rib taken from Adam's body. Now she would be dependent. She would be just a part. The first woman was solely independent. There was no question that she was inferior and Adam was superior. But the second woman from the very beginning is inferior; she is just a small rib taken out of Adam - nothing more; just a part, not even a whole. From this point the degradation of woman starts. Adam's fall may come later on, but woman's degradation, slavery, starts with this - that God has withdrawn the real woman.

This God also has a male chauvinistic mind. Why could he not say that you are both equal, there is no need to fight? But he must have been really a Jew: he could not make a little bigger bed, where both could be accommodated. It is not only a question of a bed, remember. What I am trying to say to you is: God could not manage the equality of man and woman; could not manage their being accommodated in a coexistence, without anybody being on a power trip. He himself is a man, naturally: Adam is not withdrawn. The woman is withdrawn, is annihilated, is simply finished.

And the second woman is only a false, pseudo woman. From the very beginning God manages the second woman to be a pseudo woman. This way the story proves that Eve is never going to be equal. How can the part be equal to the whole?

But when you put somebody in an inferior position, which is absolutely unfair and unjust, there is bound to be rebellion. The people who have invented this story may not have been aware what they are inventing. And nobody has interpreted it the way I am doing. The woman must have been carrying great anger. The woman must have been wanting, in some way, to show God that, "If you can be unfair, I can also destroy what you are trying to make." She is going to revolt. In the story, Christians and Jews make the part of the serpent very important. That is only an excuse. The basic thing is, the moment you try and enforce slavery, inferiority, on anybody, you are sowing the seeds of revolution, revolt. It is a revolt.

Why could the serpent not convince Adam? It would have been far easier, because man is thought to be more intelligent, more rational, more adventurous, more egoistic. And all these qualities would have been helpful for the serpent, the devil, to incite Adam against God's order - to provoke him to revolt, to disobey. And this seems to be absolutely logical, psychological, relevant.

Women, in the whole history of mankind, have never revolted. In fact, it is only man who has revolted - many times. The woman has never revolted. But the first woman is in revolt, and the devil finds it easier to convince the woman... which is not right, absolutely not right, because all the religions of the world are supported by the woman, not by the man. Woman is the backbone of all the religions of the world. If she has supported anybody, it is the priest, not the devil; it is God, not the devil.

Man has a very superficial support for the religions - very meaningless. He has no deep, intrinsic connections with religion. But the woman, around the world, in all the religions, has been the basic support; otherwise all these religions would have disappeared.

So there are only two possibilities: either these religions are proposals from the devil, which seems to be a natural conclusion of this story - that these religions are nothing but strategies of the devil, and he is still doing the old trick of manipulating the woman, and through the woman manipulating the man - or the whole story is just to condemn the woman. Those who have invented it, have invented it to condemn the woman: that she is dangerous, that she can have a rapport with the devil very easily - man has to be aware of it.

In the middle ages the popes and Christianity have done such an incredible job, unbelievable. They forced thousands of women to confess that they were witches. The word witch is not a bad word, it has no ugly connotations with it. But Christians of the middle ages made it an ugly word. 'Witch' simply means a wise woman. It no longer means that; they corrupted the word, they managed to make the word mean what they wanted: a witch is one who is in a sexual relationship with the devil.

Not only were ordinary women forced to confess and burned alive, once a woman accepted that she was a witch and has had a sexual relationship with the devil, then certainly she could not be allowed to remain alive even for a single moment. She was bringing the devil into human blood, she would pollute the whole of humanity: she had to be burned alive. And it was not ordinary women only - even nuns, mother superiors, they managed, and forced them to confess.

Anybody could raise the suspicion, just that was enough. Anybody, any man, could raise the suspicion to the pope, to the bishop, to the high priest, that this woman, this nun, seems to be a witch. That was enough for the investigation to begin. And there was a special court arranged by the pope, the Inquisition, with a big office and hundreds of people working for him in this investigation so that the devil can be destroyed from every place, wherever he has sown his seed. And nuns were more articulate in their confessions, naturally, because they knew what confession was, they knew what the devil was, they knew what kind of sexual relationship could happen with the devil. They knew all these things, and they had been suppressing their sexuality.

It was very easily possible that they may have dreamed that they were having a love affair with the devil. And they were thought to be martyrs, "because you are helping the people of God to eradicate all possibilities of the devil. You are ready to risk your life." They described in detail how the devil comes, how he looks, with two horns... instead of toes, hooves. Not only that, they described that the devil has a forked sexual organ. That is great imagination. And once one nun confessed that, then every other nun was even more articulate, more imaginative. Why a forked sexual organ? So that the devil can have double intercourse at the same time, so he can use both the woman's entries in the body at the same time. And it was believed, and they were burned. And they burned joyously because they were helping the great cause of the messiah, of God!

Now, in this story too, man is kept out, is not really responsible for the sin. The real responsibility is put on the woman. The serpent seduces her mind, as I see it. In the East, the serpent is thought to be just the opposite. It is not the symbol of the devil; it is only in Christianity and Judaism that the serpent is the symbol of the devil. In the East the serpent is the wisest animal on the earth.

In India the serpent is worshipped. There is a special day in the year devoted to the worship of the serpent, and millions of serpents of all kinds are given milk, worshipped... because it has been thought, in the East, that the serpent is a symbol of wisdom. Why? - because actually the way the serpent moves, the kundalini power inside your body moves exactly in the same way. Hence kundalini is being translated into English as serpent power.

If you have seen a serpent standing on his tail, you will be surprised, because a serpent has no bones. Standing on his tail is a miracle, because there are no bones, so how is he supporting himself? Ordinarily the serpent is always sitting or resting, with his body in the form of a circle.

That is the meaning of kundalini. Kundalini means circular, concentric circles. That is the ordinary situation of everybody's inner energy; it is in a circular way sleeping or resting.

But another strange thing about the serpent is that it has no ears. Still it dances to the tune of a certain music. When scientists found that it had no ears, they could not believe it. Then how does it happen that it dances to certain music? It is only lately they have become aware that it has no ears - that is true - but its whole body is sensitive to the vibrations of music. So it dances not by hearing the music, it dances by feeling the music.

Remember the difference: not by hearing the music - it cannot hear, there is no way of hearing - but by the vibrations of the music, the waves of the music hitting on its body. Its body is so sensitive that it starts moving with those vibrations. That too is exactly the same in the inner serpent power - the kundalini. It too starts rising up with a certain music. It has no ears, it has not even a body; it is just pure energy. But a certain music helps it tremendously.

And in the East we have found what music, what chanting, will help. For example: chanting "aum"

continuously hits your sleeping energy. The function of the aum is just to make the inner serpent rise up, stand up. The same happens with the sound "hoo"; it can happen with other sounds too.

But these two sounds have been found perfectly certain to work.

And Eastern music is totally different from Western music. Western music at the most is entertainment... at the best. At the worst, it also hits the serpent, but not upwards - exactly opposite, downwards. So most Western music is sexual. It is the same energy moving downwards that becomes sexuality. The same energy moving upwards becomes spirituality. And when the serpent reaches to the highest point in your being, the seventh chakra, the hit of the energy opens that chakra just like a lotus flower. The happening is so exactly like the lotus flower that the lotus flower became immensely significant in the East.

But the idiots invented this story, that the devil came in the form of a serpent and seduced Eve's mind, provoked her to revolt. God has said not to eat from two trees: the tree of knowledge and the tree of life. If you are impartial, with no prejudice, then who is doing the harm to man, God or the devil? God is preventing man from knowing. And just cut out all your knowing, and what are you other than a vegetable? - a cabbage, or a cauliflower. Just cut out all knowing. And that's what God's idea was, to keep man always in the state of being a vegetable. Of course vegetables don't revolt. Vegetables are dependable. Knowledge is dangerous. Intelligence is dangerous.

If you look without any prejudice, then the serpent is the friend of man, not the enemy. And even in this story he fulfills the Eastern concept of wisdom, although the people who invented this story had no idea that this interpretation is possible. But with me anything is possible. The serpent is not the devil. And the word devil has to be understood. It comes from the same Sanskrit root as the word divine. So devil and divine don't mean different things. The Sanskrit root is behind both; in Sanskrit it becomes deva, in English it becomes 'divine' and 'devil'.

Now, again a part of the story which is not being told in the churches: the devil was an angel, a divine being, just like other angels who go on singing alleluia to God. He stopped singing this alleluia to God - he must have been the most intelligent angel - and he started raising questions, questions which could not be answered, because if God was capable of answering those questions there was no need to throw the devil out of heaven. What kind of God... who can't answer questions, and can create existence? He must know the most because he is the creator of everything. And if a certain angel asks questions, they should be welcomed.

But God seems to be very dictatorial, a despot. No questions - he only gives commandments: Do this, don't do that, but never ask why. It is not for you to ask why. Do or die, but don't ask why. And this angel started asking why; hence he was thrown out. This is the angel who is condemned as the devil, satan, and different names. And this is the angel who puts this idea into Eve's mind: "God is afraid that if you eat from the tree of knowledge and life, you will be equal to God, and he does not want anybody to be equal to him. He wants to remain superior, above all, the only one who knows, the only one who understands, the only one who commands. He is very jealous and does not want any rival. But if you don't eat the fruit of these two trees you will never know what life is. You will never be able to explore this mysterious and beautiful existence."

Why has he chosen Eve? Why has he not chosen Adam? That would have been more direct - but there is a reason. Adam is male. God is male. This angel has been thrown out because he questioned, doubted. And he also understands that Eve suffers because God has been very unkind and inhuman to her. She has been created, by birth, a slave. She cannot become independent, so she carries, deep down, the possibility of rebellion.

Adam has nothing to say against God. In fact, he is very much in favor of God because when Adam had quarreled with the first woman, God withdrew the woman. He is the chosen one, the really only begotten son of God. He is special. For him, God destroyed the woman. For him, God made another woman, inferior to him in every possible way. So it will be difficult to put revolution in the mind of man. He has a vested interest in the establishment. God is the establishment and he is favored by the establishment... so why should he revolt? For rebellion you have to find somebody who has some grudge, some wound inflicted upon him. Here too, the serpent proves the wisdom, the understanding.

You can see my work - I have worked more on women than on men. Almost seventy percent of my sannyasins are women, for the simple reason that the woman is the most exploited down the ages, the most oppressed down the ages, throughout the world, inhumanly treated by everybody. Buddha, Rama, Krishna, Mahavira, all condemn her - what to say about ordinary people. She has suffered the most, and the suffering has been so long that she has completely forgotten that there is some other way also.

I know that serpent was wise. In fact God seems to be very evil when he insists that you should not eat of the fruit of knowledge and you should not eat the fruit of life. This is very evil. And he makes it a point that "if you disobey me you will be thrown out of the garden of Eden. Then you will not be protected by me; then you will be on your own. In the garden of Eden you need not bother about food. You need not bother about anything, everything is taken care of" - but it is a concentration camp. There must have been electric wires around the garden of Eden. But a serpent can enter in between electric wires without any difficulty. To me God seems to be very evil - making this emphatic point that disobedience is the greatest sin.

I would like to say to you: obedience is the greatest sin.

Listen to your intelligence, and if anything feels right, do it - but you are not obeying, you are going with your intelligence. If your intelligence finds something is wrong, then whatsoever the risk, and whatsoever the consequence, go against the order. No order is higher than your intelligence.

And God making this point... so that disobedience becomes the original sin; all other sins are just by-products. He does not bother about theft, stealing, murder, rape, no - all these things - no problem. If Adam was raping, it was okayo. Of course he could not rape another woman because there was no other woman - but there were animals, and people have been known to rape animals.

And he was himself like an animal. He may have butchered, killed animals for eating. He would have been a cannibal if there were other human beings, but there were not, so he was eating other animals. But he himself was an animal and nothing else.

But no, these are not sins, not even crimes. It is perfectly okay with God. All these criminals of the world: all rapists, all sadists, all masochists, Adolf Hitlers, Genghis Khans, Tamerlanes, Josef Stalins, all are okay - there is no problem. The greatest sin is disobedience. Strange... from God?

God should say to his children, "Be intelligent. Sharpen your intellect, and follow your inner being and consciousness." But he wants them to remain dependent on him for everything. That's the desire of a dictator.

So I cannot condemn the devil, I respect him, immensely respect him, because it is because of him that humanity exists, that man has evolved, that we have been able to produce people like Charles Darwin, Michelangelo, Galileo, Copernicus, Albert Einstein, Freud, Marx. It is because of him there have been Buddhas, Jesuses, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Socrates - it is because of him. The whole credit goes to the devil. Without him... just cabbages and cauliflowers, and nothing else.

Eve, of course, persuaded Adam very easily. Whoever has invented the story understands something of psychology - that man, if he loves a woman, would like to do anything the woman wants. If it is a question between his beloved and God, he will choose his beloved. Love is so significant to man that he can risk the garden of Eden and all its pleasures.

And the argument was also solid because the woman simply repeated what the serpent had told her, that "it is strange in this beautiful garden, we are not told that there are poisonous trees, 'don't eat them, their fruit, otherwise you will die.' We have not been told, 'There are trees which have no nourishment for you, don't eat from them; it is simply tiring your digestive system, unnecessarily burdening it.' We have been prohibited from two trees which we would never have found on our own. In such a big garden, how would we have found them?"... because it was not a botanical garden, where on each tree the name of the tree was written! It would have been just a coincidence if they had ever come across those two trees - and God prohibited it. And it seems perfectly logical, perfectly practical and pragmatic.

The woman is more practical, more pragmatic, more earthbound than man. The woman does not argue, cannot argue much, but she has an instinctive feeling, an intuitive feeling about certain things.

And it was so clear to her, without any argument, that "Preventing us from knowing... and knowing will open all the horizons of adventure, discovery. And what are we doing here if we don't know anything? What is the point of being here at all? And the tree of life... we will live here and die, and we will never know what life is. And if we cannot know what life is, how can we know what death is?

So God has closed the real doors to existence."

It was the serpent who showed her the tree of knowledge. But the story remained incomplete because God must have been spying. Dictators always have FBI and KGB and Scotland Yard and whatnot. They are very much afraid; they are continuously watching that nobody does anything which goes against their order. So Adam and Eve were caught at the first tree; they had eaten the fruit of knowledge. They could not reach the second tree. And they were expelled immediately, because now it was sure that they would find the second.

Once you have eaten from the tree of knowledge, now you cannot rest without knowing more about life, death, what happens before, what happens after, and what it is all about.

Now it is not far away - the second thing is going to be the tree of life. And before they eat the fruit of life and become eternal they have to be thrown out, and the doors have to be closed. They were thrown out naked, alone in this vast world. And the man who threw them out naked, alone in this vast world without even a set of clothes, without something to eat for a few days, without giving them a shelter somewhere... you call him God?

I think the best thing will be that we change it: it is the devil who orders, "Don't eat from these two trees," and it is God who comes as the serpent and provokes them to revolt.

And since then, since the doors of Eden closed against humanity, it has not been a loss - it has been a gain. Man has gone on continuously growing, continuously evolving. Yes, the servants of God have been trying still. Although you have been thrown out of Eden, his agents are behind you...

the Vatican, the shankaracharya, the imam. And he goes on sending his only begotten son, and the paigambara and the tirthankara and the avatara - for what? So that even now you can be prevented from knowing the ultimate secret of life.

All the religions are against science. All the religions are against knowing the truth. They are all in favor of believing, and believing is not knowing. And of course, they are absolutely against knowing the eternal source of life, because once man knows that he is eternal, he is going to say to God, "Go to hell!" Who bothers about God? The moment you know eternity, and you know your self is eternal, who cares?

Why do I not care at all about God? Even my parents were always telling me, "Don't speak against God. Who knows, he may be.... If you don't want to believe in him, don't believe, but at least don't say anything against him." My teachers were telling me, "Don't you feel afraid?"

I said, "But why should I feel afraid of somebody who is not? I am. God is not. He should feel afraid.

Why should I feel afraid?

"I am, I was, I will be."

The day I came to know the truth of my consciousness, the eternity of my consciousness, the word god became simply useless.

The devil did a tremendous service to humanity. The day humanity understands the actuality, all the temples of God will be demolished, because he has from the very beginning been against us. And if you want some temple then you should create a temple for the devil, the serpent, because all that you are, all that you have - man reaching to the moon, all the discoveries of biology which can make it possible for a human body to live at least for three hundred years, healthy and young....

You will be surprised that still there are people in Soviet Russia, near the Caucasus mountains - there is a tribe in which you can find people of one hundred and fifty years, one hundred and sixty years, very easily. And not in a hospital bed, their legs hanging in the air, no: still working, still alive.

In the Caucasus you can find a man of one hundred and twenty years of age getting married! Six generations of his are there, alive, and he is again going to get married.

In India, in a small part that used to be part of Kashmir and has been forcibly, illegally taken over by Pakistan, there are people who are one hundred and fifty years old - that is the average. It is not a surprise to those people; they are surprised that others go on dying so soon. Scientists are working out what the reason is. Is their climate the reason? or their food? or their race, that they come with an inbuilt age? What is the reason? Yet nothing has been found which is different from you.

So it seems that they have lived apart in the mountains, and the idea of seventy years of age has not hypnotized them. They have not thought that you have to live only seventy years. It seems to be a kind of deep hypnosis. Down the ages everybody knows how long one man is to live - seventy years. So if you live hygienically, with better food, climate, and take care of your body, perhaps eighty years, perhaps ninety years - but that's all.

I am reminded of George Bernard Shaw. At the age of eighty-five he moved out of London. Strange, because he had lived that long in London, and his whole society was London; all his friends were there, all those who appreciated him, and the intelligentsia. It was in those days when London was the capital of the world. At the age of eighty-five he suddenly decided to move out of London.

He started going to all the cemeteries in nearby villages. His friends asked, "Are you going mad?

What are you doing? What are you searching for?"

He said, "I want to find a cemetery where people have lived more than a hundred years. I will move to that village." And he moved to that village where he found on the grave that somebody had lived to one hundred, somebody to one hundred and ten, somebody to one hundred and twenty - he moved to that village. He said, "This village has the right psychology." And he lived really long. Perhaps that psychology helped. Psychology also creates a climate around you.

In fact man can live as long as he wants, because the body is naturally embodied with all possibilities to go on renewing itself. It is the only mechanism - science has not discovered any other mechanism - which can go on renewing itself. The body is continuously renewing, throwing out all dead cells, creating new, living cells. It has such a miraculous process. Fighting with all the germs that can kill it, it immediately produces antibodies to fight with them. And wherever the need is, those antibodies immediately start rushing towards that point.

If by some mistake you cut your hand and blood starts coming, what is happening to your inner chemistry? From all over your body blood cells immediately start rushing towards this point. A certain communication exists inside: that there is trouble, too much blood should not go out, so blood cells have to move and make a layer there to stop the blood from moving out. These blood cells are intelligent people - in fact, far more intelligent than you may be. And they do their work fast and absolutely correctly, in the right way, never making a mistake.

Thousands of processes are going on in the body continuously. It is a self-renewing life. There is no fixed time for it; science can manage very easily for man to live three hundred, five hundred, one thousand years. And naturally, if you can live one thousand years, then wisdom will go on and on growing. It is an accumulative process. And by that very possibility of man living longer, new doors of knowledge will open, which will in their turn make your life even longer.

This story is beautiful; I have always loved it. But it has been used wrongly, it has been misused. It has been used to prove to you that you are the byproduct of Adam and Eve's original sin. So you are born in original sin, your very birth is in sin; you are a byproduct of it. The only way is to become obedient to God. That is the message of this story. If you want to get back into the garden of Eden, be obedient to God. Believe, have faith, never doubt. Then God will welcome you back, accept you back.

But do you want to go back to the garden of Eden, and become again Adam and Eve? At least I refuse to go there - because I cannot fulfill that idiotic condition. But millions of people are trying to fulfill it. Christians, Mohammedans, Hindus - everybody is trying to fulfill it, to get back, to undo what Adam and Eve and the serpent have done.

To my people I say, we are not to undo it. They have done a great revolution. We have to go even further and explore more, and know more.

We have not to leave any nook and corner of existence and of our being unknown, in darkness. We have to bring light everywhere. And unless that happens you will be in misery, you will be in anguish.

Your beliefs are not going to help; your faith is not going to help. And that garden of Eden is just a fiction. It exists nowhere except in the neurotic minds, psychotic minds, where things like that exist.

And this story is based on - and only on - a single point, and that is obedience or disobedience.

I teach you disobedience. Obedience needs nothing - no intelligence, no guts. Obedience needs nothing. Disobedience needs everything, because you are going to be on your own. And unless you are on your own, you will never be able to know who you are.

Okay Sheela?