Rajneesh Quotes

Life is a mystery, and there is nothing to explain everything is just open, it is in front of you. Encounter it! Meet it! Be courageous!

The very idea that you can pursue happiness, that you can deserve it, that you can demand it, that you have the right to be happy, is foolish. Nobody has the right to be happy. You can be happy, but there is nothing like a right about it. And if you think that it is your right you will go on missing, because you have started to look in the wrong direction from the very beginning.

A life of both sadness and blissfulness is multi-dimensional; it moves in all dimensions together. Watch the statue of Buddha or sometimes look into my eyes and you will find both together - a blissfulness, a peace, a sadness also.

To me, life in its totality is good. And when you understand life in its totality, only then can you celebrate; otherwise not. Celebration means: whatsoever happens is irrelevant - I celebrate. Celebration is not conditional on certain things: 'When I am happy then I will celebrate,' or, 'When I am unhappy I will not celebrate.' No. Celebration is unconditional; I celebrate life. It brings unhappiness - good, I celebrate it. It brings happiness - good, I celebrate it. Celebration is my attitude, unconditional to what life brings.

A mature person has the integrity to stand alone. And when a mature person gives love, he or she gives without any strings attached to it. When two mature persons are in love, one of the great paradoxes of life happens, one of the most beautiful phenomena: they are together and yet tremendously alone. They are together so much that they are almost one. Two mature persons in love help each other to become more free. There is no politics involved, no diplomacy, no effort to dominate. Only freedom and love.

‎I am something that was. and I am something that not yet.

Man is certainly not creative, but his creativity should not be concerned with God. His creativity should be concerned with making a better world, a better society, better literature, better poetry, better paintings, better sculpture, better human beings.

"When you accept your life - when you take your breakfast, and when you sleep and when you walk and when you take your bath - how can you create an ego out of these things? Sleeping when feeling sleepy, eating when feeling hungry, how can you create your ego? No, if you fast, you can create ego. If you are on a vigilance for the whole night, and you say, "I am not going to sleep," you can create the ego. By the morning, the person who has slept well will have no ego, you will have a great ego."

Fearlessness is not the absence of fear, fearlessness is the total presence of fear with the courage to face it.

A man becomes a Buddha the moment he accepts all that life brings with gratitude.

Meditation is not your doing. You simply make the effort, but it is not your doing. Your effort is needed to prepare the ground. As the ground is ready, immediately you see you are no more; the whole cosmos is. You have entered a greater womb, an eternal womb of tremendous peace and ecstasy.

You may have decided again and again, and again and again you have failed - not because smoking is such a great phenomenon that you cannot get out of it, but because you are trying from the wrong end. Rather than becoming aware of the whole situation - why you smoke in the first place - rather than becoming aware of the process of smoking, you are simply trying to drop it. It is like pruning the leaves of a tree without cutting the roots.

Sadness is not necessarily something bad. Don't judge it as a bad or negative quality.

Your ego is just an idea implanted in your mind. It is poisonous. Your ego keeps driving you madder and madder.

What is meditation? It is not your character, it is not what you do. It is what you are. It is not the character, it is the consciousness that you bring to whatsoever you do. The doing is irrelevant. Whether you are doing it consciously or not is the question, whether moral or immoral. Are you alert? If you are alert, meditation happens. If you are not alert, you live in sleep.

The playfulness that I talk about comes very slowly. You cannot just jump out of your seriousness which you have accumulated for lives. Now it has a force of its own. It is not a simple matter to relax; it is one of the most complex phenomena possible, because all that we are taught is tension, anxiety, anguish. Seriousness is the very core the society is built around. Playfulness is for small children, not for grown-up people. And I am teaching you to be children again, to be playful again. It is a quantum leap, a jump...but it takes time to understand.

Creativity has two possibilities. One is that it arises out of your silence, love, understanding, your clarity of vision, your intimate friendliness with existence - then creativity is healthy. But if it does not arise out of meditation, out of silence and peace and understanding and love, then there is a danger. It may be arising out of your confused mind. It may be arising out of your insanity.

Meditation is enjoying oneself, just sitting silently doing nothing: happy, joyous without any reason, because all reasons come from outside. You meet a beautiful woman and you are happy, or you meet a beautiful man and you are happy - but the meditator is simply happy. His happiness has no reason from the outside world; his happiness wells up within himself.

Existence loves laughter. You may have observed, or not, that man is the only animal in the whole of existence who is capable of laughing. Laughter is the only distinguishing mark that you are not a buffalo, you are not a donkey; you are a human being. Laughter defines your humanity and your evolution. And the greatest laugh is at your own ridiculous things.

Without Jesus they were the great priests of the temple; with Jesus suddenly they were nobodies. In the presence of Jesus there was God himself and all the priests felt their glory had been taken away.

In countries where breast-feeding has stopped, more smoking will automatically be there. That's why the West smokes more than the East - because no mother is ready to give her breast to the child because the shape is lost. So in the West smoking is increasing more and more; even small children are smoking.

The beauty is in finding, not in what you find ; that is just an excuse.

[W]hen the mind is really absent, in that silence, in that unlimited space, your potential starts glowing, radiating, flowering. Suddenly you are full of cherry blossoms, a new presence, a new fragrance.

Don't be serious about seriousness. Laugh about it, be a little foolish. Don't condemn foolishness; it has its own beauties.

Life is possible only through challenges. Life is possible only when you have both good weather and bad weather, when you have both pleasure and pain, when you have both winter and summer, day and night. When you have both sadness and happiness, discomfort and comfort. Life moves between these two polarities. Moving between these two polarities you learn how to balance. Between these two wings you learn how to fly to the farthest star.

All our attachments are outward oriented and hence this illusion.

God is nothing but creativity. So wherever there is a sign of creativity, God has a signature there. He has already been there. Maybe even the poet does not know, but he has been touched by something from the beyond.

Zorba is beautiful, but something is missing. The earth is his, but the heaven is missing. He is earthly, rooted, like a giant cedar, but he has no wings. He cannot fly into the sky. He has roots but no wings.

Become alert! Relationship destroys love, destroys the very possibility of its birth.

If you are really feeling happy, you are feeling happy even if the whole world contradicts you. If the whole world agrees that you are not happy, then too it doesn't matter. Your happiness is real. It cannot be canceled by anybody's opinion. But if your happiness is unreal, it can be canceled by anybody. Even a small child can cancel it. You will be constantly looking towards people. You will be smiling, trying to show that you are happy so that they can say, 'Yes. You are very happy. You look very happy.'

Mind is a duality; it is always split. There is no single point on which the mind agrees in totality. Half of the mind will agree and half of the mind will disagree, and whatever you choose, you are choosing only the half. The remaining half is going to take revenge. The unchosen part, the left over, will wait for its chance to show you that whatever you have chosen is wrong. But it does not matter which part you choose. Choice itself is wrong.

Two persons can be very loving together. The more loving they are, the less is the possibility of any relationship. The more loving they are, the more freedom exists between them. The more loving they are, the less is the possibility of any demand, any domination, any expectation. And naturally, there is no question of any frustration

When you drop the ego, you drop a whole world that you have created around it. For the first time you are able to see things as they are - not as you would like them to be. And when you are capable of knowing the facts of life, you become capable of knowing the truth. The facility of life is the first step towards truth. And ego is the most falsifying agent.

Never belong to a crowd; Never belong to a nation; Never belong to a religion; Never belong to a race. Belong to the whole existence. Why limit yourself to small things? When the whole is available.

The less people know, the more stubbornly they know it.

Love can exist only after meditation, not before it. That is a simple existential law. Before meditation - only lust, only sexuality. Before meditation you are an animal and not really a human being. With meditation a transformation comes: you become human, and out of your humanness, love flows.

Millions of people miss meditation because meditation has taken on a wrong connotation. It looks very serious, looks gloomy, has something of the church in it, looks as if it is only for people who are dead, or almost dead, who are gloomy, serious, have long faces, who have lost festivity, fun, playfulness, celebration.... A really meditative person is playful: life is fun for him.... He enjoys it tremendously. He is not serious. He is relaxed.

If you go into it, it is marriage that has created prostitution. And prostitution will never disappear from the world unless marriage disappears; it is the shadow of marriage. In fact prostitutes have been saving marriage. It is a safety measure so the man can go once in a while, just for a change, to any other woman, a prostitute, and save his marriage and its permanency.

Meditation is the only magic that can help you to be free from the mind, can help you to be free from yourself, your past and all the burden of the past.

Right awareness is awareness of one's own being in its totality: all that is good and all that is bad. But as you become aware, the bad starts disappearing - just as when you bring light into the room, the darkness disappears. When light is in the room, darkness cannot exist there. Sin is darkness, forgetfulness, unconsciousness.

The future of humanity will move closer and closer toward the approach of Zen, because the meeting of the East and West is possible only through something like Zen, which is earthly and yet unearthly.

When you love, love as if the person is a god, not less than that. Never love a woman as a woman and never love a man as a man.

Children can be taught meditation more easily because they are not yet spoiled. When you have been spoiled the hard work is to help you to unlearn.

What do marriage vows show? They show that you may want to separate sometime in the future. If there is love between two people, the thought of taking vows never arises. This is only an indication of the absence of love. People do not marry out of love; they marry out of fear. If there is love on this earth, marriage will become redundant. When love is not, marriage is a must. We make arrangements for that which we cannot do. We make rules for that which we are not sure of.

The Mind: a beautiful servant, a dangerous master.

Up to now, men and women have not been living in relationship - because woman has never been thought equal. And relationship exists only between equal people; it cannot happen between unequal people. Unless woman is given total freedom, absolute equality, there will be no possibility to relate. Up to now, man has exploited woman, woman has exploited man; there has not been real relationship.

Love dispels fear just as light dispels darkness. If even for a moment you have been in love with someone, fear disappears and thinking stops. With fear thinking continues. The more you are afraid, the more you have to think.

A certain darkness is needed to see the stars.