Rajneesh Quotes

Jealousy is almost like a shadow of love. If we can grow our love, it takes over the whole energy of jealousy and transforms it into love. It is an alchemical change.

According to great masters, there is no sin and there is no virtue. There is only one thing: that is awareness. If you are aware, you can do anything you want and it is not sin. If you are not aware, you may do so-called virtuous acts, but there is no virtue in them. Out of unconsciousness virtue cannot blossom. It blossoms only when you are full of light, full of love, full of consciousness.

God has a tremendous sense of humor! Religion remains something dead without a sense of humor as a foundation to it. God would not have been able to create the world if he had no sense of humor. God is not serious at all. Seriousness is a state of disease; humor is health. Love, laughter, life, they are aspects of the same energy.

Jealousy is comparison. And we have been taught to compare, we have been conditioned to compare, always compare. Somebody else has a better house, somebody else has a more beautiful body, somebody else has more money, somebody else has a more charismatic personality. Compare, go on comparing yourself with everybody else you pass by, and great jealousy will be the outcome; it is the by-product of the conditioning for comparison.

Never be ashamed of your tears. Be proud that you are still natural. Be proud that you can express the inexpressible through your tears.

You cannot force things to happen before their time. The Spring Will come and the flowers will blossom, but you cannot force the Spring. The Rain will come, the clouds will cover the sky, the whole thirst of the earth will be gone- but you cannot force it. And this is the beauty... that the more patient you are, the quicker is the coming of Spring.

To live in relationship and yet remain independent, that is what courage is.

Life is a mirror, it reflects your face. Be friendly, and all of life will reflect friendliness.

If you become more sensitive to beauty, to poetry, that means your love has blossomed. And all the energy that has been left by fear, anger and hate, will be taken over by your love, your sensitivity, your compassion, your creativity. This is the whole alchemy of changing base metals into gold.

Half of humanity has been accepting the inner world but denying the outer world.

So what you are doing, be aware, observe it, and then go on meditating. Soon you will begin to feel the change. Now there is no possessiveness in relationship. By and by, possessiveness disappears. And when possessiveness is not there, relationship has a beauty of its own. When possessiveness is there, everything becomes dirty, ugly, inhuman.

Sometimes happiness comes, sometimes sadness, anger, jealousy - you need not make them your problems

Desire is our imprisonment. The man who wants nothing, who is absolutely contented as he is, is free of all bondage. He has attained to ultimate freedom, nirvana - and that is the goal of life. And it is only by attaining that freedom that you will know the significance of being, the song of being, the celebration of being. Your life will become a continuous bliss, and not only that YOU will be blissful, you will be able to bless others too. The whole existence will be blessed by you, by your very presence.

Just be yourself, it means to be beautiful.

See what your misery is, what desires are causing it, and why you are clinging to those desires. And it is not for the first time that you are clinging to those desires; this has been the pattern of your whole life and you have not arrived anywhere. You go on in circles, you never come to any real growth. You remain childish, stupid. And you are born with the intelligence that can make you a buddha, but it is lost in unnecessary things.

The essential religion is taking the whole responsibility for whatsoever you are. And immediately an insight arises: 'If I am responsible for my suffering, then it is simple, I can drop it. It is my choice. I will not choose it any more.'

Look at the paintings of Picasso. He is a great painter, but just a subjective artist. Looking at his paintings, you will start feeling sick, dizzy, something going berserk in your mind. You cannot go on looking at Picasso's painting long enough. You would like to get away, because the painting has not come from a silent being. It has come from a chaos. It is a by product of a nightmare. But ninety-nine percent art belongs to that category.

If he loves, he wants to make a relationship out of it immediately! He wants to get married. He wants to create a certain conditioning. He wants to make it a contract. Or he enters a church, or he enters a political party, or he enters into any club and he wants to be structured, he wants to know where he stands in the hierarchy, in what relationship. He wants to have an identity - that 'I am this.' He does not want to remain uncertain. And life is uncertain. Only death is certain.

Creativity is secondary, meditation is basic and fundamental; everything should come out of your meditation. Then it will give you a beatitude, your being a new song, and it will help others to experience something of it. It will depend on their meditativeness.

Remember from this very moment: always choose that which is good for you and good for others. Choose creativity. Become a blessing to existence, because that is the only way that we can persuade God to become a blessing to us. That's the only true prayer: becoming a blessing to everyone - to people, to animals, to trees, to life in all its forms. If one remains consciously alert, slowly slowly the art is learned; slowly slowly it becomes just natural.

Reality has no security and that is its beauty. Life has no security and that is its beauty. Because there is no security, there is adventure. Because the future is unknown, nobody knows what is going to happen the next moment. That's why there is challenge, growth, adventure. If you miss adventure, you miss all. If your life is not that of an adventure, of a search into the unknown, then you are living in vain.

Meditation is the technique of inner conquest - and that is the real challenge. Those who have any guts should accept the inner challenge. It is easy to reach the moon, it is easy to reach Everest; it is far more difficult to reach your own centre. But the moment you reach it all ecstasy is yours, and forever and forever. You attain to a bliss which cannot be taken away from you.

Meditation is perhaps the master key for all our problems.

Pleasure is always something apposed to pain it is never separate from pain

If your creativity comes out of your silence, out of your Zen, out of your meditations, then it is authentic, original. If it comes only as an occupation because you are feeling lost and there is nothing to do - a long holiday, so you start doing something... That is not coming out of your silences, it is coming out of your crazy mind.

The man of meditation becomes the man of understanding because his energy accumulates. He is not wasting it. He is not interested in trivia; he does not put any energy at all into petty things. So whenever the time arises to give, he has to give. Energy is understanding. Be conscious of it and use your energy very consciously, and use your energy in such a way that you don't simply go on wasting it.

Unless you know yourself as eternal beings, part of the whole, you will remain afraid of death.

You go on reacting to the image not to the person, and hence there is no relationship. When there is no image, then there is relationship.

When love and hate are both absent everything becomes clear and undisguised.

The capacity to be alone is the capacity to love. It may look paradoxical to you, but it is not. It is an existential truth: only those people who are capable of being alone are capable of love, of sharing, of going into the deepest core of the other person without possessing the other, without becoming dependent on the other, without reducing the other to a thing, and without becoming addicted to the other.

I would like to you to become rooted into the earth. I am perfectly in agreement with Friedrich Nietzsche who says: "I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth and do not believe in those who speak of other worldly hopes!" Learn your first lesson of trust by trusting the earth. It is your home right now!

Where does the ego get its energy? The ego feeds off your desire to be something else. You are poor and you want to be rich - the ego is absorbing energy, its life-breath. You are ignorant and you want to become a wise one - the ego is absorbing energy. You are a wretched nobody and you want to become powerful - the ego is absorbing energy.

Love can never possess. Love is giving freedom to the other. Love is an unconditional gift, it is not a bargain.

I don't think existence wants you to be serious. I have not seen a serious tree. I have not seen a serious bird. I have not seen a serious sunrise. I have not seen a serious starry night. It seems they are all laughing in their own ways, dancing in their own ways. We may not understand it, but there is a subtle feeling that the whole existence is a celebration.

Laughter is more sacred than prayer, dancing more spiritual than chanting mantras, loving existence more cosmic than going to a church.

Marriage is a totally different phenomenon: it is the climax of love. Then it is good. I am not against marriage - I am for the REAL marriage. I am against the false, the pseudo, that exists. But it is an arrangement. It gives you a certain security, safety, occupation. It keeps you engaged. Otherwise, it gives you no enrichment, it gives you no nourishment.

All of the religions are looking after the poor. At least leave me alone to look after the rich. I am the rich man's guru.

Spirituality is your original face; it is the discovery of your intrinsic nature.

Life begins where fear ends.

I teach you that there is no other aim than to live with such totality that each moment becomes a celebration. The very idea of "aim" brings future into the mind, because any aim, any end, any goal, needs future. All your goals deprive you of your present, which is the only reality you have. The future is only your imagination, and the past is just footprints left in the sands of your memory. Neither is the past real anymore, nor is the future real yet. This moment is the only reality.

And through meditation comes wisdom - not through studying books, not through scriptures. Through scriptures one can become knowledgeable but no wise. and knowledgeable people are sad, they are bound to be sad because all their knowledge is borrowed. There can be no song in it.

The ordinary man is living a very abnormal life, because his values are upside down. Money is more important than meditation; logic is more important than love; mind is more important than heart; power over others is more important than power over one's own being. Mundane things are more important than finding some treasures which death cannot destroy.

Meditation has to become your heartbeat; even when you are asleep the meditation continues like an undercurrent

Zen people love Buddha so tremendously that they can even play jokes upon him. It is out of great love; they are not afraid.

During the first seven years, every society tries to condition the mind - and conditioning means nothing but hypnosis: forcing authority, law, tradition, religion, scripture, the priest, the church, into the innermost unconscious of the child so that from there you can control him.

Self-knowledge is not the knowledge of a dead self, self-knowledge is the knowledge of the process of the self. It is an alive phenomenon. The self is not a thing, it is an event, it is a process. Never think in terms of things, the self is not there inside you just like a thing waiting in your room. The self is a process: changing, moving, arriving at new altitudes, moving into new planes, going deeper into new depths. Each moment much work is going on and the only way to encounter this self is to encounter it in relationship.

Unless the inner changes, the outer can never be perfect.

Try to find your individuality, your integrity, and make the effort of not compromising. Because the more you compromise, the less you are an individual. You are only a cog in the wheel, just a part in the vast mechanism, just a small part of the mob - not an individual in your own beauty, in your own right. I am absolutely against compromise. Death is far more beautiful than a life of compromise.