Take a good look at your mind. Examine it closely. The first thing you will come to know is that the mind has become the master - not you and not your soul! The mind says: Do this! And you do it! If you don't the mind creates problems. It become sad, and the sadness of the mind becomes your sadness. If you do as it says you get nowhere, for the mind is blind. Where can you reach by obeying the mind! The is unconsciousness. If you listen to it you reach nowhere.
RajneeshAll that is great cannot be possessed - and that is one of the most foolish things man goes on doing. We want to possess.
RajneeshRemember this: with mind you will always be a loser. Even if you are victorious, your victories will be just defeats. With mind there is no victory, with no-mind there is no defeat. You have to shift your whole consciousness from mind to no-mind. Once no-mind is there, everything is victorious. Once the no-mind is there, nothing goes wrong, nothing can go wrong.
RajneeshWith the disappearance of the future, the only thing that remains in your hands is now. Then you can go deep into this now - whatsoever you are doing. You can be eating or dancing or making love to a woman or singing or digging a hole in the ground - whatsoever you are doing. This is the only time you have, why not do it totally? Why not celebrate it? Celebration and being total mean the same thing. You celebrate only when you are total in something, and when you are total in something you celebrate it.
RajneeshGreed arises only because your present moment is empty, and to live in an empty moment hurts very much. To forget it you project greed into the future, thinking that tomorrow things are going to be better, a lottery is going to open in your name. But of course you have to wait for tomorrow, it cannot be just now - and tomorrow never comes. All that comes is always the present moment, which is empty. Greed is because we don't know how to live the present moment in its total richness.
RajneeshIn the East we call this state meditation: no belief, no thought, no desire, no prejudice, no conditioning - in fact, no mind at all. A state of no-mind is meditation. When you can look without any mind interfering, distorting, interpreting, then you see the truth. The truth is already all around; just you have to put your mind aside.
RajneeshA little foolishness, enough 2 enjoy life, & a little wisdom to avoid the errors, that will do
RajneeshYou are all adding to each other's unhappiness; you are all helping each other to be more unhappy. Every single man has many people behind him making him unhappy. If an understanding of compassion is there, then you will change all the ways that you cause unhappiness in others. And if you can bring happiness to someone's life, you will find a way to do it.
RajneeshIn fact everything can become a sort of meditation, because in everything there are two dimensions - just as there are in the first breath: the outer and the inner.
RajneeshYou will have to relax from the circumference. The first step in relaxing is the body. Remember as many times as possible to look in the body, whether you are carrying some tension in the body somewhere - at the neck, in the head, in the legs. Relax it consciously. Just go to that part of the body, and persuade that part, say to it lovingly "Relax!"
RajneeshEffortlessness means not doing anything, inactivity - AKARMA. Effort means doing much, activity - KARMA. Both have to be there. Do much, but don`t be a doer - then you achieve both. Move in the world, but don`t be a part of it. Live in the world, but don`t let the world live in you. Then the contradiction has been absorbed. Then you are not rejecting anything, not denying anything. Then the whole God has been accepted.
RajneeshMeaning is man-created. And because you constantly look for meaning, you start to feel meaninglessness.
RajneeshFreedom is not to be destroyed in the name of love. Freedom is a far higher value than your so-called love.
RajneeshYour honesty, Your love, Your compassion should come from your inner being, not from teachings and scriptures.
RajneeshI am here to help you unburden all your guilt feelings. I am here to help you to start trusting yourself again. Once you start trusting your own being, no politician, no priest can exploit you. Man is always exploited through fear.
RajneeshWhen you don't cling to anything, there is nowhere to go - all boats have been abandoned, you cannot go anywhere; all paths have been dropped, you cannot go anywhere; all dreams and desires have disappeared, there is no way to move. Relaxation happens of its own accord. Just think of the word relax. Be, settle, you have come home.
RajneeshTo be able to celebrate life is religion. In that very celebration you come close to God. If one is able to celebrate, God is not far away; if one is not able to celebrate life, then God does not exist for him. God appears only in deep celebration, when you are so full of joy that all misery has left you, all darkness has left you.
RajneeshA silence is needed before death, before life, before love. If you love a person you sit silently with the person. You would not like to chatter, you would like to just hold their hand and live and be silent in that moment. If you chatter, that means you are avoiding the person - love is not really there. If you love life, chattering will drop, because every moment is so filled with life that there is no way, no space to chatter. Each moment life is flooding you so vitally - where is the time to gossip and chatter?
RajneeshYou cannot stop smoking directly because it has many related things, implications. You are tense, and if you stop smoking you will start something else and the other may be more harmful. Don't go on escaping problems, face them. The problem is that you are tense, so the goal should be how to be non-tense, not, smoking or not smoking. Meditate. Relax your tensions without any object into the sky, allow catharsis to happen. When you are non-tense these things will become absurd, foolish, and they will drop. Food will change, your styles of living will change.
RajneeshAn enlightened person is the richest person possible, but his richness comes from surrender, not from fight. He does not... he has not any conflict with the whole. He has fallen in harmony, he is in a harmonia.
RajneeshIt is not that I love contradictions: life is contradictory. Existence itself is possible only through contradictions.
RajneeshIf you love a flower, don’t pick it up. Because if you pick it up it dies and it ceases to be what you love. So if you love a flower, let it be. Love is not about possession. Love is about appreciation.
RajneeshThe more you are possession oriented, the less happy you will be. The less happy you are, the farther away from the Divine, from prayer, from gratitude you will be. Be austere. Live with the necessary and forget about desires; they are fantasies in the mind, ripples in the lake. They only disturb you, they can never lead you to any contentment.
RajneeshNever sacrifice your life for anything! Sacrifice everything for life! Life is the ultimate goal.
RajneeshA meditator cannot smoke, for the simple reason that he never feels nervous, in anxiety, in tension. Smoking helps - on a momentary basis - to forget about your anxieties, your tensions, your nervousness. Other things can do the same - chewing gum can do the same, but smoking does it the best. In your deep unconscious, smoking is related with sucking milk from your mother's breast. And as civilization has grown, no woman wants the child to be brought up by breast-feeding - naturally; he will destroy the breast. The breast will lose its roundness, its beauty.
RajneeshWhen there is nothing to desire, there is nothing to dream about either, because dreams are reflections of your desires. Dreams are reflections of your frustrations, dreams are reflections of your repressions, dreams reflect your day-life.
RajneeshIf you really want to drop the guilt you will have to drop your parental voices within, the priestly voices within. You will have to get rid of your parents and your conditioning. Life has been in such a trap up to now that even a small child starts feeling guilty. We have not yet been able to develop an education which can help people to grow without feeling guilty. And unless that education happens man will remain ill, ill at ease.
RajneeshTo be motherly is a totally different phenomenon. It is something absolutely human; it transcends animality. It has nothing to do with biology. It is love, pure love, unconditional love. When a mother loves unconditionally - and only a mother can love unconditionally - the child learns the joy of unconditional love. The child becomes capable of loving unconditionally. And to be able to love unconditionally is to be religious. And it is the easiest thing for a woman to do. It is easy for her because naturally she is ready for it.
RajneeshGod is not a person at all. You cannot worship God. You can live in a godly way but you cannot worship God - there is nobody to worship. All your worship is sheer stupidity, all your images of God are your own creation. There is no God as such, but there is godliness, certainly - in the flowers, in the birds, in the stars, in the eyes of the people, when a song arises in the heart and poetry surrounds you... all this is God. Let us say `godliness` rather than using the word `God` - that word gives you the idea of a person, and God is not a person but a presence.
RajneeshBut in the West it is very easy to dissolve the ego. So whenever a Western seeker reaches an understanding that ego is the problem he can easily dissolve it, more easily than any Eastern seeker. This is the paradox - in the West ego is taught, in the East egolessness is taught. But in the West it is easy to dissolve the ego, in the East it is very difficult.
RajneeshThis mind is a prison. It cannot find any freedom anywhere. It must die before freedom comes to you. But we have taken the mind as us, we are identified with it. This death of mind never happens to us, it never occurs to us.
RajneeshOne day you will disappear on a funeral pyre - just into nothingness, as smoke. Don't get attached to anything. This attachment takes you away from your real being; you become focused on the thing to which you are attached. Your awareness gets lost in things, in money, in people, in power. And there are a thousand and one things, the whole thick jungle around you, to be lost in. Remember, non-attachment is the secret of finding yourself, then awareness can turn inwards because you don't have anything outside to catch hold of. It is free, and in this freedom you can know your self-nature.
RajneeshLove is ultimate, the highest health, because love makes one whole. When you love a master by and by you completely forgot about love.
RajneeshBuddha says if you surrender the ego, if you surrender yourself, you come in a harmony with the law and everything starts happening on its own. You have but to surrender. If you are ready to disappear, you will be full of the law and the law will take care.
RajneeshIf this is understood then things become very clear. Misery makes you special. Happiness is a universal phenomenon, there is nothing special about it.
RajneeshExperiment with this a little. During these days that you are here with me, don't nourish any desire for happiness, and then see how your heart becomes filled with happiness. Don't have any desire for peace, and see how the turmoil within you vanishes. Don't beg for contentment and see how contentment showers down on you. Please try this - only then will you understand.
Rajneesh