But man has created a God in the skies. Why? This God is not a real God, it is a substitute – because you are missing him here, and you are missing him so tremendously that you have to put him somewhere or other, otherwise you will feel very alone. You will feel so lonely that you will miss the meaning of life. And it is good to put him very far away, because then there is no hurry. The journey is so far that you cannot complete it today. Even this life is not enough. So there is enough space to postpone, enough space to say, “Yes, one day I will do it,” enough space to pretend that you are interested in him and continue to be of the world and going on talking at the same time about God. This is the double-talk, the double bind of ordinary humanity. People talk about God and live according to the Devil. They go to the temple but they never reach. They read the Bible, they read the Koran, but they never listen. These are pretensions, only on the surface. This is how the hypocritical humanity is born – a false, pseudo-humanity.

I have heard:

Mulla Nasruddin went to his psychiatrist once and said, “Doctor, I wonder if you can split my personality for me?”

“Why? Why would you want to do that?” asked the doctor, surprised.

“Because,” said the Mulla, “I am so lonesome.”

Man feels very alone without God, and to find the real God is arduous. It is very easy to create a pseudo-God which looks like God, which appears like God. It at least gives consolation that you are not alone. Have you watched your concept of God? Has it arisen out of the experience of your own being, or has it arisen out of your experience of your loneliness? This is the criterion: if you believe in God because you feel lonely, your God is going to be false; if you believe in God because you have experienced him in your aloneness, if it has come out of your own being, then the God is real. Then let Nietzsche declare that God is dead – your God can never be dead, your God is alive in you. How can Nietzsche declare that God is dead? But he could declare it, and not only declare; his declaration became a prophecy. Within a hundred years, his declaration has become a reality. The God of the churches is dead, the God of the temples is dead, the God of the books is dead. Nobody has ever been so prophetic as Nietzsche has been. God is disappearing; the very word has become ugly.

Just the other day I was reading a Christian priest’s book. I was surprised, because I have heard about cases, particularly in India, in which people, if they want to read Playboy, hide it in their Gita or in their Bible and read it. That I have heard. But that Christian says that he was so afraid to read the Bible that he was hiding his Bible behind the cover of a Playboy magazine! It has come to happen in the West. So when he would go every Sunday to his beauty parlor, he would take his Bible. But afraid that others might see that he was reading the Bible, so out of date, he would hide it in a Playboy magazine and would read his Bible there.

One day in the Bible he came across Jesus’ saying, “If you deny me, remember, at the last day of judgment I will also deny you.” So he became afraid because this was a sort of denial – reading the Bible behind the cover of Playboy. He became so afraid that he started perspiring, because Jesus says, “If you deny me, then before God I will not recognize you.” So he threw away the Playboy magazine and he felt so good. He went to his priest and said, “Today I have done a great deed. I gathered courage to let people know that I read the Bible.”