Krishna: The Man and His Philosophy - Osho - Oshorajneesh.com

CHAPTER 14. ACTION, INACTION AND NON-ACTION
can a perfect God create an imperfect world? Evolution means that the world grows gradually, and
creation means that the whole world comes into being altogether.
It is significant that originally the word shristhi, meaning creation, belonged to the Hindus, and
prakriti, meaning pre-creation, belonged to the Jainas and Buddhists and Sankhyaites. In the course
of time, however, they got mixed up. But the Hindus cannot accept the word prakriti, which means
that which is is there from the time before creation, that which is uncreated, which is eternal. Creation
means something which was not always there and which was created and which can be terminated,
The concept of the pre-created, the uncreated, of prakriti, belongs to an altogether different school
which does not believe in creation. Sankhyaites, Jainas, and Buddhists don’t have the concept
of a creator because when nothing is created, the question of a creator does not arise. So God
disappeared, he has no place in their philosophies. God is needed only in the form of a creator, and
so those who rejected creation also rejected God. God as creator belongs only to those who accept
the idea of creation.
Arvind brought with him the idea of evolution from the West. When Arvind was a student in England,
Darwin’s ideas were sweeping across Europe. Evidently he was very much influenced by them.
After his return to India he studied eastern philosophy, and studied it deeply. I deliberately use
the word ”studied” to say that he did not know the truth on his own, his knowledge was merely
intellectual. Although he possessed a sharp intellect, his direct experience of truth was very dim.
Consequently he produced a crossbreed of eastern mysticism and western rationalism, which is an
anomaly. India’s psyche is not much concerned with the study of nature, matter and their evolution,
it is basically concerned with the understanding of mind and spirit. The meeting of the western
thought of evolution with the eastern understanding of the psyche gave rise to a strange idea of
psychic evolution, which became Arvind’s lifework. Like nature, he thought consciousness evolves
too.
Arvind added something new to the idea of evolution which is his own, and for this very reason it
is utterly wrong. Very often original ideas are wrong, because they happen to be the finding of a
single person. It is true that traditional beliefs, in the course of time, degenerate into fossils, but they
have a validity of their own because millions of people go out to find them. This new idea which built
Arvind’s reputation concerns the descent of divine consciousness.
Down the centuries we have believed that man has to rise and ascend to God; it is always an upward
journey, an ascent. Arvind thinks otherwise: he thinks that God will descend and meet man.
In a way this is also like the two sides of a coin. The truth happens to be exactly in the middle.
That truth is that both man and God move towards each other and meet somewhere midway. This
meeting always happens somewhere midway, but the old idea emphasized man’s efforts – and not
without reason. As far as God is concerned, he is always available to man providing man wants to
meet him. That much is certain, and therefore God can be left out of this consideration. But it is
not certain that man will make a move to meet God. So it mostly depends on man and his journey
towards God, his efforts. God’s journey towards man can be taken for granted. Too much emphasis
on God moving toward man is likely to weaken man’s efforts.
Arvind starts from the wrong end when he says that God is going to descend on us. But he has great
appeal to people who are not interested in doing anything on their own. They took enthusiastically
Krishna: The Man and His Philosophy 279 Osho