And you don’t have to learn what nature is. When you feel thirsty, you know you need water. When you feel hungry, you know you need food. Your nature continuously guides you. Except nature there is no other guide. All other guides are misguides. They take you away from the natural course, and once you are out of your natural course, misery starts. And your misery is their joy, because only the miserable go to the churches, only the miserable go to the temples.

When you are feeling happy and joyous, young and healthy, who cares about the churches? Life is so rich, and life is such a joy, who wants to enter into those graveyards where sadness is thought to be seriousness? Where a long face is thought to be religious? Where to burst into laughter…you will be condemned as a madman? Where dancing is not allowed? Where love is prohibited? Where you have to sit listening to dead words, so old and so dusty they don’t touch your heart, they don’t give a thrill to your being? But these churches and temples and mosques have dominated man.

Zarathustra hopes, just like every mystic, that this cannot go on forever. Someday the intelligence of man is going to rebel.

Rebellion is the only hope. Someday man is going to destroy all these so-called houses of God, because this planet, this sky full of stars, is the only temple there is; all other temples are man-made. And this life in the trees, in the animals, in human beings is the only living God.

The gods that are sitting in the temples are just manufactured by man. It is very strange that these religions go on saying that God created the world, but their gods are created by men. They say, “God created the human being just like himself. He created man in his own image.”

The truth is just the contrary – man has created God in his own image. That’s why a Chinese god will be different from a Hindu god, an African god will be different from a European god – because people are creating gods in their own image. And the stupidity reaches to its extreme: you create those images and then you kneel down before them. Can you think of anything more idiotic? And then you start praying.

Children could be forgiven; they love their toys and they love their teddy-bears. But you have not grown up, you also love your teddy-bears. Your teddy-bears are in your temples, in your churches, in your synagogues. But they are teddy-bears – they fulfill the same function.

The child feels alone without the teddy-bear. A small child was here a few days ago. His mother is a sannyasin, Amrito from Greece, and when I was in Greece he became very friendly with me. He brought a teddy-bear for me! And he told his mother, “I will not leave India unless I give the teddy-bear to Osho, because he lives alone, he needs some companions.”

What are your gods? Consolations, because you feel, even in the crowd, that you are alone. You need a teddy-bear in the sky, an eternal teddy-bear who will be always with you. He is omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent – he can do anything. He is just a consolation. The people who believe in God have not allowed themselves to be grown-ups. They have remained retarded in their psychology; otherwise there would be no need of any God.