My whole approach is that you are to become the creator. You have to release your creative energies. And this is possible only if this God, who is nothing but a Godot, is removed, absolutely removed from your vision of life. Yes, in the beginning you will feel very empty because that place of God in you has been filled. Millions of years he was there; the sacred shrine in your heart was filled with the idea of God. Now, suddenly throwing it out, you will feel empty, afraid, lost. But it is good to feel empty. It is good to feel afraid. It is good to be lost, because this is the reality, and what you were feeling before was only fiction. Fictions cannot help much; they may give you some consolation, but consolation is not a good thing.

What is needed is transformation, not consolation. What is needed is treatment of all the diseases that you have been carrying, not consolation. So the first thing is: remove God. Don’t wait for any Godot. There is none. There has never been any.

Friedrich Nietzsche said…I disagree with him, but my disagreement is totally different from the disagreement of others, of all others who disagree. Nietzsche says, “God is dead.” Of course Christians have differed, Mohammedans have differed, Hindus have differed, Buddhists have differed, everybody has been against Friedrich Nietzsche. I am also against him, but my reason for being different is that God is not dead because he has never been alive. Even to say, “God is dead,” is to accept that he was there and now he is no more. No, he was never there in the first place. Man has lived under a fiction.

And this situation, this misery, this increasing tension…. The tension is so much that now in the most advanced countries, the second greatest factor causing death is not a disease but suicide. One feels so utterly tense, day after day, and there seems to be no way out. And the anguish goes on increasing, and one cannot even see the reason for what we are suffering. Why should we be suffering? What have we done? Life itself seems to be worthless. A point comes in the intelligent man’s life when he sees it is all futile, meaningless.

Then why go on dragging? Why not finish it? Why not get rid of it? It has not given you anything except pain. It is not going to give you anything else except pain. Yes, there is an opium somewhere – the hope: perhaps tomorrow things may be different. Perhaps, if not today, tomorrow you may be able to get some moment of bliss. But even then it does not seem to be worth it. Such a long caravan of miseries, and then once in a while a moment when you can smile, laugh. And by the time you have smiled it is gone. Perhaps that moment is also your imagination. Just to keep yourself going you start dreaming of things which are not really there; you wanted them to be there. That’s actually the function of dreaming.

Do you know? It has been a strange discovery of modern psychology…. For centuries we had thought that dreams are useless, just a disturbance in the night. To have a dreamless sleep has been thought a healthy goal. For ten thousand years Yoga has been teaching that dreamless sleep is the most beautiful experience, but what we have found recently goes against this whole thing. You can drop your dreamless moments of sleep without any harm to you, but you cannot drop your dreams.