| |
an imprisonment, a long drawn-out slavery. And Zarathustra is not alone in pointing out the fact that the concept of God is against the evolution of man: Mahavira agrees with him; Gautam Buddha agrees with him.
All these three great geniuses are in absolute agreement on one point: God cannot be allowed as a creator of man and his consciousness. To allow him that is to destroy all meaning, significance, freedom, love, creativity -- all that gives joy and ecstasy to man is destroyed. Without God, man is free. He has not been created, he has been evolving. You have to understand this point, that the idea of creation and the idea of evolution are contradictory. You can't have both -- creation means no evolution.
You create something -- a statue, a painting, a poem. Will your painting evolve? Will your statue change with time? Will your poetry go on renewing itself each and every moment to keep pace with evolution? Anything created has a full stop on it; there is no opening for evolution. That's what the story of the creation of the world says: God created the world in six days -- and there comes the full stop.
Evolution means that the universe has always been there -- constantly changing, moving, evolving, creating new forms, better forms. It is evolution that has brought about man and his consciousness. Evolution is religion for Zarathustra, not creation. And in evolution there is no place for God, at least not as a creator. The only place possible for God, if you love the word, if you want it somehow to be fitted in somewhere, the only possibility is that man's consciousness evolves to its ultimate potential. That will be the creation of God.
Zarathustra denies God as a creator, but he is willing to accept God as the ultimate creation of human consciousness. To avoid misunderstanding, he calls this ultimate evolution of consciousness "the superman." Superman is his God. But he does not come at the beginning, he comes at the very crescendo, in the end. He is not your master and your lord, he is your evolved form, refined form. Hence another thing has to be remembered: Zarathustra cannot believe in one God. There are millions of beings, they
|
|
|