Just today a young women came to meet me. She asked me, “Tell me Baba, is there really a God?”
She was ready to argue that there is no God. I looked at her face, her eyes. She was tense, filled with argument; she wanted to fight about the point. Really deep down she wanted God to not exist, because if there is a God then you are in trouble. If there is a God then you cannot remain whatsoever you are; then a challenge comes.
God is a challenge
It means you cannot be satisfied with yourself; something higher than you is possible. A higher state, and absolute state of consciousness is possible. That’s what God means.
So she was ready to argue, and she said, “I am an atheist and I don’t believe in God.”
I told her, “If there is no God, how can you not believe in him? And God is irrelevant. Your belief and your disbelief, your argument for and your argument against is related to you; it is not related to God. Why are you concerned? If there is no God, why have you traveled so long, and why have you come to me to argue about something which is not? Go to your home, don’t waste your time. If HE is not, then why are you worried? Why this effort to prove that HE is not? This effort shows something about you. You are afraid. If God is, then it is a challenge. If God is not, then you can remain whatsoever you are; there is no challenge to life.”
A Person who is afraid of challenges, risks, dangers, of changing himself, of mutation, will always deny that there is a God. the denial is his mind; the denial shows somthing about him, not about God.
I told her that God is not a thing which can be proved or disapproved. God is not an object about which we can take some opinion for or against. God is a possibility within you. If you travel to that possibility, he becomes real. If you don’t travel up to that point, he is unreal. And if you argue against him them there is no point in traveling; you remain the same. And this becomes a vicious circle.
You argue that God is not, and because of it you never travel towards him – because it is an inner travel, an inner journey. You never travel, because how can you travel towards the point which is not? So you remain the same. And when you remain the same you never meet, you never encounter God. You never come to any feeling, to any vibration of him. Then it is proved more for you that HE is not. And the more it is proved, the more you are far away, the more you are falling, the more the gap increases.
It is a question of whether you want to grow towards God
So it is not a question of whether God is or is not, I told her. It is a question of whether you want to grow or not. If you grow, your total growth will be meeting, your total growth will be the communion, your total growth will be the encounter. I told her one anecdote.
One windy morning, just as the spring was ending, a snail started traveling upward on a cherry tree. Some sparrows which were just on a neighboring oak started laughing, because it was not the season and there were no cherries on the tree, and this poor snail was making so much effort to reach the top. They laughed at his expense.
The one sparrow flew down, came near the snail and said, “Darling, where are you going? There are no cherries yet on the tree.”
But the snail never paused; she continued her upward journey, Without pausing, the snail said, “But they will be there when I reach them. It will take a long time for me to reach to the top, and by that time cherries will be there.”
God is not, but he will be there by the time you reach. It is not something which is already there – it is never there. It is a growth. It is your own growth. When you reach to a point where you are totally conscious, God is. But don’t argue. Rather than wasting your energy in arguing, use your energy to transforming yours
