An Idea Whose Time Has Come
Osho,
Is God overhead in the sky, in heaven?
God is everywhere. God is everywhereness. God is not a person. You cannot locate him. God is the totality of all beings, of all things. But down the ages man has looked at the sky overhead for God, for a certain reason. The reason is not that God is overhead, the reason is that to search for God we have to go above our heads, that we have to transcend ourselves, that we have to look upwards. Not that God is there, God is everywhere – below you, beside you, behind you, in front of you.
But we look up because we are low. We are living in a dark valley, and we look up. This is a kind of inner search. Just as the tree grows upwards, man grows upwards. Man is a kind of tree. But remember always, when the tree grows upwards its roots meanwhile are growing downwards. If the tree only grows upwards it will fall, it will not be able to remain rooted in the soil. The bigger the tree, the deeper it has to go low-wards, downwards. The roots go into the soil and the branches grow into the sky, and there is a great balance. It is almost in proportion. The bigger tree will have bigger roots, and the proportion is almost the same. There is a balance.
If a tree only goes downwards, it will be meaningless; and if a tree only goes upwards, it will not be able to exist. That’s what has happened to humanity. A few people live only downwards: in sexuality, in food, in the body – in the lower centers. They go on spreading their roots. Their life becomes meaningless, because meaning arises only when you start rising upwards. The higher you go, the more meaning, the more significance, because there is more light. Clouds become available to you, and the sun and the moon and the stars, and life starts taking the shape of poetry. Life starts becoming a song. You can sway and dance into the sky, and you can whisper with the stars, and you can love the wind and the rains, and you can have a dialogue with the sun – with the source of life and light. Roots remain dismal, sad, dark, lost into the soil. If a tree has only roots and no branches, no foliage, no leaves, no flowers, no fruits, how can it be meaningful? It cannot have fulfillment. Fulfillment comes only from fruition, flowering.
But if a tree simply goes upwards and forgets to grow its roots, it will fall down; it cannot grow very far. It will be at most seasonal. Flowers will come and within weeks they will be gone. It will be very tentative. There cannot be any eternal significance in it. It will be seasonal.
Excerpted From I Say Unto You, Vol. 2 CH: 6
