Rajneesh Quotes

Hence there are so many kinds of love and so many kinds of compassion. But the basic, the most fundamental, is to understand this three-rung ladder of love. That will help you, that will give you an insight into where you are, what kind of love you are living in and what kind of compassion is happening to you. Watch. Beware not to remain caught in it. There are higher realms, heights to be climbed, peaks to be attained.

Lovers feel a certain burning in their hearts. A deep longing and desire to meet with the beloved creates that burning. To love God is bound to create a very great fire in you. You will be on fire because you have chosen as your love object something impossible. You will have to weep and cry, and you will have to pray, and you will have to fast, and your mind has to continuously repeat and remember the beloved.

It is impossible! It has never happened - it cannot happen in the very nature of things. Marriage is something against nature. Marriage is an imposition, an invention of man - certainly out of necessity, but now even that necessity is out of date. It was a necessary evil in the past, but now it can be dropped. And it should be dropped: man has suffered enough for it, more than enough. It is an ugly institution for the simple reason that love cannot be legalized. Love and law are contradictory phenomena.

Life is such a mystery, no one can understand it, and one who claims that he understands it is simply ignorant. He is not aware of what he is saying, of what nonsense he is talking. If you are wise, this will be the first realization: life cannot be understood. Understanding is impossible. Only this much can be understood - that understanding is impossible.

Crowds create illusions.

Life is a garden. It is an opportunity. You can grow weeds, you can grow roses; it all depends on you.

The whole art of allowing the truth to take possession of you is of being vulnerable, of being open, of being in a let-go. Or in other words, the whole art consists of one word, "surrender". And that's what sannyas is, that's my definition of a sannyasin: a man who is surrendered to existence so totally that he never thinks in terms of achievement any more, because he is no more. Who is there to achieve? - he has disappeared totally, he has not left even a trace behind. In that very moment, when you are just a pure nothingness, truth arrives. It is a gift of God.

It is not that the intellect sometimes misunderstands. Rather, the intellect always misunderstands. It is not that the intellect sometimes errs, it is that the intellect is the error.

You will have to go deep into man. From where comes this violence? From where comes this exploitation? From where come all these ego-trips? From where? They all come from unconsciousness. Man lives asleep, man lives mechanically. That mechanism has to be broken, man has to be re-done. That is the religious revolution that has not been tried.

Love knows how to forgive. Love cannot hurt and cannot be violent.

Very few people are accepted as creative: A few painters, a few poets - one in a million. This is foolish! Every human being is a born creator. Watch children and you will see: all children are creative. By and by, we destroy their creativity.

Man wants two contradictory things together: he wants peace and he is ambitious. It is impossible. If you are ambitious, then your mind is bound to remain restless. If you want peace, then the first requirement is to drop all ambition. Unless you drop ambition you cannot be at ease, at peace, you cannot be relaxed.

The love to which ego is attached is a form of jealousy - this is why nobody is as jealous as lovers are. The love which is attached to the ego is a conspiracy and a trick to possess the other. It is a conspiracy - that is why nobody suffocates so many people as those who talk of love. This situation is created because of the 'love' which comes from the ego - there can never be any relation between love and the ego.

Meditation means cleansing the mirror, dropping thoughts, letting thoughts disappear, attaining to moments when thinking ceases. And those are the most blissful moments in life. Once you have tasted a single moment of no-thought, you have taken a great leap into truth; then things will become more and more easy every day.

Zen is not effort. Effort is tension, effort is work, effort is to achieve something. Zen is not something to achieve. You are already that. Just relax, relax so deeply that you become a revelation to yourself.

There are a few things that can be done only by experiencing them. Love is one of them. There is no way to learn it; you have to do it. And by trial and error one learns.

When a man's life becomes poetry, becomes a song, becomes a work of art, a creativity, he has become a sannyasin. Whether he knows it or not, it does not matter. The word 'sannyas' does not matter; what matters is the content.

For the Baul, life is not a serious thing. It is fun, it is laughter, it is joy. So you cannot find anything like the seriousness of a church-goer, or the long faces of so-called religious people in the world of the Bauls. They love laughter, they love fun. They enjoy small things with tremendous respect. Ordinarily, religions are very long-faced, very sombre, serious, because they have to be - they are against life.

I have been in love with the thought of Heraclitus.

In relationship, be blissful, in aloneness be aware and they will help each other, like two wings of a bird.

Anybody who gives you a belief system is your enemy, because the belief system becomes the barrier for your eyes, you cannot see the truth.

You can call it godliness - it IS godliness. It is the highest, the greatest flowering of being. But it is not a God somewhere outside you. You cannot pray to it. You can be it, but you cannot pray to it, because it is not separate.

The desire for total happiness and for ultimate freedom lies dormant in everyone. It is in the form of a seed. It is like a seed that contains a tree within it. In the same way, the fulfillment of man's ultimate desire is hidden in his very nature. In its perfectly developed state, it is our nature to be happy, to be free. Our real nature is the only thing that is true, and only perfecting it can bring complete satisfaction.

Beware: don't choose the convenient, the comfortable, the respectable, the socially acceptable. Choose something that rings a bell in your heart.

When you are so full that there is no emptiness in you, that you have started feeling the significance of the ordinary, day-to-day existence, when moment to moment you live totally, intensely, passionately, then God is available.

If you take the responsibility for your life you can start changing it. Slow will be the change, only in the course of time will you start; moving into the world of light and crystallization, but once you are crystallized you will know what real revolution is. Then share your revolution with others; it has to go that way, from heart to heart.

Without possessions, success, fame; who are you?

It is beautiful to be alone, it is also beautiful to to be in love, to be with people. And they are complementary, not contradictory.

The ego can exist only with goals, ambitions, desires.

All the great artists of the world slowly slowly start growing a quality of feminineness, grace, elegance, exquisiteness. A certain flavor of softness, relaxedness, calmness and quietness surrounds them. They are no longer feverish. What I am teaching here is really to turn the whole world feminine.

True celebration should come from your life, in your life. And true celebration cannot be according to the calendar, that on the first of November you will celebrate. Strange, the whole year you are miserable and on the first of November suddenly you come out of misery, dancing. Either, the misery is false, or the first of November is false; both cannot be true. And once the first of November has gone, you are back in your dark hole, everybody in his misery, everybody in his anxiety.

Buddhas have a strength which is not of this world. Their strength is totally of love... Like a rose flower or a dewdrop. Their strength is very fragile, vulnerable. Their strength is the strength of life not of death. Their power is not of that which kills; their power is of that which creates. Their power is not of violence, aggression; their power is that of compassion.

The word devil is very beautiful, if you read it backwards it becomes lived.

Awareness means to listen to me unfocused - alert of course, not fallen asleep, but alert to these birds, their chirping, alert to the wind that passes through the trees, alert to everything that is happening. Concentration excludes much, includes little. Awareness excludes nothing, includes all. Awareness is a state of no-mind. You are, yet you are not focused. You are just a mirror reflecting all, echoing all; see the beauty of it and the silence and the stillness.

The process of meditation does not take you to some new world; it only introduces you to the world where you have been for lives upon lives. The process of meditation does not add anything to you; it only takes away what is wrong, cuts it away, sheds it off.

In fact, entertainment has taken the place of celebration in the present world. But entertainment is quite different from celebration; entertainment and celebration are never the same. In celebration you are a participant; in entertainment you are only a spectator. In entertainment you watch others playing for you. So while celebration is active, entertainment is passive. In celebration you dance, while in entertainment you watch someone dancing, for which you pay him.

Just think: you cannot find a single misery for which you are not responsible. It may be jealousy, it may be anger, it may be greed - but something in you must be the reason that is creating the misery.

The less the head, the more the wound will heal. No head there is no wound. Live a headless life. Move as a total being, and accept things.

Drop the idea of becoming someone, because you are already a masterpiece. You cannot be improved. You have only to come to it, to know it, to realize it.

Through meditation one discovers one's own light. That light you can call your soul, your self, your God—whatsoever word you choose—or you can remain just silent because it has no name. It is a nameless experience, tremendously beautiful, ecstatic, utterly silent, but it gives you the taste of eternity, of timelessness, of something beyond death.

Only when there are many people who are pools of peace, silence, understanding, will war disappear.

For a prayer oriented religion the concept of a personal God is needed - to relate to. For meditation-oriented religions God is a useless hypothesis; it can be discarded easily into the dustbin. It is not needed.

Be passive. In your passivity, God comes. Be feminine. In your femininity, God comes. Have you not watched it? Buddha looks very feminine, Krishna looks very feminine. Why? - because it is simply a metaphor. They have been depicted as feminine, graceful, to show that that is their inner quality - receptivity. When you are doing something you are being aggressive. When you are not doing anything you are non-aggressive. And God cannot be conquered; you can only allow him to conquer you.

Meditation, perhaps, is the only alchemy that can transform a beggar into an emperor.

Surrendering means non-desiring.

Each moment brings new surprises to the one who has no expectations, who comes with an absolutely open mind. Then incredible things start happening. Even if you had wanted them you could not have expected them; you could not have found yourself worthy enough to expect them.

Celebration is my attitude, unconditional to what life brings.

Imitation has to be avoided. Understanding should be the only law, never imitation.