Existence has its own wisdom, existence has its own love

The first question:

Is it not the same to call existence intelligent and loving as to call it God? It might not be the Christian concept of God but there are other pantheistic concepts which see God in everything.

It is not the same. God gives a sense of personality, of limitedness, while existence gives you an unlimited, non-personal vastness. God cannot be equivalent to existence. God has always been conceived by all religions, monotheistic or polytheistic, as the creator of existence. And existence is not a created phenomenon; it has been here always.

So first the God gives you an impression that he is the creator. Then many lies start arising out of the God. Then prayer becomes possible, then worship becomes possible, then statues of God become possible. Then temples and churches and mosques start arising. Then organized religions become possible. God is the center of all organized religions.

Once you accept God as a person, you have limited intelligence, invested intelligence in one person. I am spreading it all over existence. The whole existence is intelligent, caring, compassionate, loving, but it is not a person. It is not limited in any way; it is unlimited, infinite and eternal. There is no beginning, no end. It is continuously evolving towards higher peaks and higher peaks; it is continuously fathoming depths beyond depths. There are skies beyond skies; there is no end to existence, it has no boundary. […]

Existence is a totally different concept. It is not your fiction; it is there. When you were not here, it was there. When you will not be here, it will be here. We come and go; we are just waves in this vast ocean of existence. We come and go, existence remains. And to find that which remains is the ultimate truth. You don’t have to worship nature, you don’t have to pray to nature. Those things are only associated with the fiction of God. Existence is non-judgmental. I want to emphasize this fact as categorically as possible. […]

This is the criterion for me: if you are suffering, that means you are not in tune with nature. If you are miserable, that means you are not in tune with nature. So the moment you feel you are miserable, suffering, in agony, immediately try to make the distance smaller, come closer to existence and suddenly there will be light and there will be joy and there will be song and there will be celebration. […]

God has been one of the greatest disturbances to human evolution because it has made people hallucinate, destroying their intelligence, destroying their possibility of becoming a buddha.

Existence has its own wisdom, existence has its own love. You just have to experiment. And now science is very clear about it.

In fact, the first scientist who became aware of the sensitivity and intelligence of trees was so shocked because he felt, “We don’t have that sensitivity and that intelligence; it is a totally different dimension which we have never bothered about. And we have lived with trees for millennia, millions of years. But we have never bothered to find out whether those trees have any intelligence, any sensitivity.” It is just within ten years that scientists have become aware.

Now they have a special instrument, like a cardiogram; it has exactly the same type of mechanism. They put the cardiogram around the tree and the cardiogram starts giving the graph, how the tree is feeling. And the graph is very harmonious; the sun is rising, a cool breeze is blowing and the tree is dancing in the wind, in the sun; she is really happy. The graph is very harmonious, there is no tension in the tree’s mind, no trouble, no anxiety. The graph continues harmonious… and suddenly a gardener appears with an ax in his hand. Immediately the graph starts trembling, it is no more harmonious, the tree is feeling worried. But this happens only if the gardener is going to cut the tree. It is strange, the tree is not bothered by the ax; the tree is bothered by the intention of the gardener. When it became clear to the scientist, it was really shocking.

First they thought it was the ax. The tree has no eyes, but it must have some way of perceiving. But finally they found that it is not the ax, it is the intention of the person; because one time they brought a gardener with an ax just to cut the trees, including the tree that they were working on. The gardener had to cut one of the branches. And the tree completely freaked out. The graph showed that the tree was absolutely against what was going to happen. It was shocking… because trees don’t have eyes, and how far away was the gardener with his ax? And then they tried a gardener coming with the ax, but with no intention of cutting the tree. And the graph remained harmonious.

So it was not the ax, it was the desire, the intention of the gardener to which the tree was somehow receptive. And then they worked on. For ten years the work has been going on, particularly in the Soviet Union. They wired other trees also near the main tree, and they found that it was not only the tree which was going to be cut, but other trees also feel sympathy for the tree; their graphs don’t go that crazy, but they become disharmonious. They are feeling that one of their friends, one of their neighbors, is going to be cut. But this happens only if there is intention. If there is no intention and the mali comes with an ax and passes by, no tree gives any sign of worry, anxiety, anguish. This whole existence has its own ways of being intelligent.

Our intelligence is not the only intelligence. A famous scientist, John Lilly, has been working – and he has almost gone crazy – he has been working on dolphins. Dolphins have a very different language. Nobody has ever thought that anybody had language except man. And the dolphin’s head is bigger than a man’s head; it has more nerves than the man’s head. Perhaps it is a higher stage of intelligence than man.

It uses a certain system which is called sonar, because it creates a certain sound in the water. That sound travels through the water for miles and reaches another dolphin to whom it is addressed – without any wire, this is a wireless system. There are thousands of dolphins in the area, but perhaps the boyfriend or the girlfriend… and the message is a sound we cannot hear, it is beyond the range of our hearing. Only when we magnify it through instruments can we hear it, a certain very beautiful sound.

And it must be that the sound is directed to a particular dolphin – perhaps that particular dolphin has a name and address. The sound reaches and soon you find the other dolphin rushing to the spot from where the first dolphin has given the signal, “Come soon!”

Lilly has been working almost his whole life, and he has become almost insane working with dolphins. Just now one friend suggested he should come here, forget dolphins for a few days and meditate for a few days to calm down. The shock is great, that dolphins have a language that we cannot understand, we cannot even hear. And their language is capable of traveling miles and miles in the ocean and reaching the right address.

Dolphins are very loving animals, very playful, very joyous. They have never attacked any human being or any other dolphin – no fight, no quarrel. If you are swimming, they will swim with you. If you are playing with them, they will play with you. They are perfectly happy with human beings, they have no problem at all. The whole existence…

I used to have a mali, a gardener, a very old man. I found that once in a while when he was not aware that I was watching – I may have been inside the house looking at him through the window – he was talking to the trees. I caught him one day red-handed, I said, “What are you doing?”

He said, “Don’t tell anybody. They will think I am mad. But the truth is that I feel a certain affinity… My whole life I have worked with trees; I have always talked to them and to my surprise, if I put two plants of equal height and I talk to one plant and not to the other – and I give equal nourishment, equal care, equal water, equal sun, equal manure to both, but to one I talk with great love, I caress with my hands – that tree grows faster. Soon, within a month, it has a height double the other tree. Although everything else is equal, one thing is missing – my love.

And he used to win every year the competition for flowers. He produced the greatest roses I have ever seen, the greatest dahlias I have ever seen. And his strategy was to talk to the flowers, “Don’t let me down. The competition is coming closer. You have to give me one big flower, the biggest that you can manage.”

I became intimate with him and he knew that I would not tell anybody. I understand him and I don’t think he is mad. He is working perfectly. Poor fellow, if he had been educated and scientific, he would have found many secrets about trees. But I have seen it with my own eyes because he was with me for almost nine years. And when I left, he wanted to come with me. But I said, “In Bombay I won’t have a garden.”

He even wrote to America, when I was there, “Now you have such a big place there, why don’t you call me, although I am too old and not much use. But still, what I can do with trees, nobody else can do.”

Existence has multidimensional intelligence. We are only one section of this vast universe. Don’t think for a single moment that I am putting existence in place of God. No! God does not exist, existence exists. That’s why we call it existence.

Osho, God is Dead, Now Zen is the Only Living Truth, Ch 4, Q 1 (excerpt)