“……In the first place, why do we want God to be reduced to an idol?
The very enormity of existence baffles us. The very infinity, and we feel we are falling into an abyss. Out of fear man creates a God, a small God, small like man. Out of fear man creates God in his own image and then he feels at ease.
With the enormity of existence, to feel at ease you will have to disappear. Either disappear into the infinity of existence or create a manageable God. Create a temple in your home, let God be reduced to an image – then you can forget the enormity, the hugeness, the immenseness.
Because of the eternal silence of existence, man wants to create a song to sing. The song may be of the Vedas or of the Koran; it doesn’t matter. The sound is consoling, the silence frightening.
The image feels human, part of our world. The imageless God is superhuman, it is beyond us. Unless we go beyond ourselves, we cannot meet the true God. To avoid that meeting, to avoid that transcendence, we create a small God of our own. We start having dialogues with our created God, man-made, manufactured by the human mind. We worship, we pray, we do rituals and we are happy. It is a kind of dream, it is not entry into reality. Your temples are barriers to God, not doors. They pretend to be doors, but they are not. And your ideals, your images, your philosophies, your continuous effort to fill the emptiness of existence with words, philosophies, systems, are nothing but creating a false security around you.
God is insecurity. To be with God is to be constantly in danger. To move into God is to move into the unknown and the unknowable. That frightens, that scares. One starts losing oneself. One wants to hold back. One wants not to look into the enormity. Then those small Gods created by yourself or by your priests out of your cunning, cleverness, skill, are of great help. They are false because you have created them.
The true God is one who has created you, the false God is one that you have created. This is one of the fundamental insights of Sufism: that the temple has to be empty, empty of all that is man-made. The prayer has to be silent, silent of all that man has fabricated in words. The prayer can only be a dialogue – wordless, silent – with the infinity. It can only be a disappearance on your part. You can only dissolve, melt, merge. Then you are transplanted, taken up, transported. Then the winds take you beyond the desert, beyond the wasteland of mind.
But to be ready for that, great courage is needed. And man is always happy with toys……”
------ The Wisdom of the Sands, Vol 1, Osho