Rajneesh Quotes

Your seed has been covered with so many layers of culture, etiquitte, education, religion, country, that you have completely forgotten that you are here to grow, that you have become a lush green bush full of flowers, fragrance, dancing in the wind and in the rain and in the sun.

You become angry because something or someone has done something against your expectations.

The modern mind has lost all capacity to wonder. It has lost all capacity to look into the mysterious, into the miraculous - because of knowledge, because it thinks it knows.

Whatever you do, do with deep alertness, then even small things become sacred.

In the East a man becomes divine only when he is no longer jealous, a man is thought to be enlightened only when he is no longer jealous. Jealousy is a by-product of the ego and when the ego disappears jealousy disappears. You cannot offend a buddha. Whatsoever you do you cannot offend him.

Change only one thing, change from misery to bliss. from sadness to celebration. And it can be done very easily because misery is an unnatural thing.

God is the ultimate experience of silence, of beauty, of bliss, a state of inner celebration.

It does not mean that there will be no work if we turn life into a celebration. It is not that the wind does not work; it is always moving, blowing. It is not that the stars are idle; they are constantly moving. It is not that flowers don't do anything when they bloom; really, they do a lot. But for them, doing it is not that important; what is important is being.

It is a totally different creativity I am talking about. A Taj Mahal... just watching it on a full moon night, and great meditation is bound to arise in you. Or the temples of Khajuraho, Konarak, Puri - just meditating on them and you will be surprised that all your sexuality is transformed into love. They are miracles of creativity. They were not created by pathological people, they were created by those who had attained.

Accept yourself as you are. And that is the most difficult thing in the world, because it goes against your training, education, your culture.

Every being is in search of truth, but small fears go on preventing you.

When sadness comes, just sit by the side and look at it and say, "I am the watcher, I am not sadness," and see the difference. Immediately you have cut the very root of sadness. It is no more nourished. It will die of starvation. We feed these emotions by being identified with them.

You cease totally and only then you arrive. You enter into the world of God, or godliness, only when you are no more.

Only Zorbas become Buddhas - and Buddha was never a monk, A monk is one who has never been a Zorba and has become enchanted by the words of Buddhas. A monk is an imitator, he is false, pseudo. He imitates Buddhas. He may be Christian, he may be Buddhist, he may be a Hindu - that doesn't make much difference - but he imitates Buddhas.

Just one quality of the Buddha has to be remembered. He consists only of one quality: witnessing. This small word witnessing contains the whole of spirituality. Witness that you are not the body. Witness that you are not the mind. Witness that you are only a witness. As the witnessing deepens, you start becoming drunk with the divine. That is what is called ecstasy.

Live each moment as if you were going to die the next, and then there will be a great intensity and a great passion. You will be aflame with life. That being aflame is what being divine is to me.

This ego has all the desires, ambitions, wants to be always on the top of everything. You are exploited by this ego. And this never allows you even a glimpse of your real authentic self, and your life is there, in your authenticity. Hence, this ego only produces misery, suffering, fighting, frustration, madness, suicide, murder - all kinds of crime.

Withdraw your awareness from everywhere and just let it rest within yourself, and you have arrived home.

Learn something from marriage. Marriage represents the whole world in a miniature form: it teaches you many things. It is only the mediocre ones who learn nothing. Otherwise it will teach you that you don't know what love is, that you don't know how to relate, that you don't know how to communicate, that you don't know how to commune, that you don't know how to live with another. It is a mirror: it shows your face to you in all its different aspects. And it is all needed for your maturity. But a person who remains clinging to it forever remains immature. One has to go beyond it too.

Life isn't a balance between throwing out and inviting in.

It does not matter if you are a rose or a lotus or a marigold. What matters is that you are flowering.

Sinners live in a sort of hell, and saints imagine themselves in a sort of heaven. And the sage? - for him it is moksha, for him it is the absolute freedom. He is freed from all duality. The secret key, and the only key, is awareness.

Out of your awareness you cannot become soldiers in a war because you will be able to see, with clear eyes, that you are going to kill people - people who have done no harm to you personally, people just like you. They have their children, their wives, their mothers, their old fathers to take care of - and you are killing the person just to get a gold medal. Your gun will slip out of your hand, and that will be an act of awareness. And you will feel tremendously blissful that it happened; even if you are being shot your death will be a glory, a peace, an adventure, a journey into a new world.

Ordinarily all desires exist in the second state of consciousness, the dreaming state. Desire is a dream and to work for a dream is doomed from the very beginning, because a dream can never become real. Even if sometimes you feel it has become almost real, it never becomes real - a dream by nature is empty. It has no substance in it.

Create the way by your walking; you will not find a ready-made path

No, I don't want to give my people sticks. I want to give them eyes.

When one is in love with existence one feels such blessing, such bliss, that it is natural to bow down in deep gratitude.

Marriage is very secure. It is safe. There is no growth in it. One is simply stuck. Marriage is a sexual arrangement; intimacy is a search for love. Marriage is a sort of prostitution, a permanent sort. One has got married to a woman or to a man - it is a permanent prostitution. The arrangement is economical, not psychological, not of the heart.

Being is primary and doing is secondary for them. Celebration comes first and work takes a back seat in their lives. Work is preparatory to celebration.

Meditation is a surrender, it is not a demand. It is not forcing existence your way, it is relaxing into the way existence wants you to be. It is a let-go.

Jesus was not famous in his day. If there were no Bible, there would have been no record of him. The record belongs to his four disciples; nobody else has ever mentioned him, whether he existed or not. He was not famous. He was not successful. Can you think of a greater failure than Jesus? But, by and by, he became more and more significant; by and by, people recognized him. It takes time.

I am here; be nourished by me. Eat me, drink me; be nourished by me. Let me become a part of your being, then I will be available forever and forever. There is no other way.

Anger is active sadness; sadness is inactive anger. They are not two things. Watch your own behaviour. When do you find yourself sad? You find yourself sad only in situations where you cannot be angry. The boss in the office says something and you cannot be angry; it is uneconomical. You cannot be angry and you have to go on smiling - then you become sad. The energy has become inactive. You come home, and with your wife you find a small thing, anything irrelevant, and you become angry.

Love is the opposite of [lust]: respecting the other as an end unto himself or herself. When you love someone as an end unto himself, then there is no feeling of hurt; you become enriched through it. Love makes everybody rich.

Life is not a tragedy, it is a comedy. To be alive means to have a sense of humor.

It has happened, women have helped their husbands, sacrificed their whole lives, never thought about themselves. Their surrender, their devotion to their lovers has been total. In this totality, they have achieved before their lover has.

Except witnessing, I don't teach anything else. So just witness your mind and the meditation will be happening. And once you have got in tune with your being, you know the way, you know the how. Then it does not matter where you are. Alone or in the crowd, in the silences of the forest or in the noises of a marketplace, it is all the same. You can simply close your eyes and disappear inwards.

First, meditation, and then out of meditation comes creativity of its own accord.

Death is the most misunderstood phenomenon. People have thought of death as the end of life. That is the first, basic misunderstanding.

All religions are nothing but a science - or an art - to teach you how to die. And the only way to teach you how to die is to teach you how to live. They are not separate. If you know what right living is, you will know what right dying is. So the first thing, or the most fundamental thing is: how to live.

We exist solely because we have a body and a mind ? a mind that arises out of the body. If this were true, we would cease to exist after our body was gone.

Happy people continuously change; and because they change they become more and more happy; and then more and more change is possible.

In samadhi, in the highest form of meditation, the same thing happens: the mind stops functioning... but you are conscious. That is the only difference, but the difference that makes the difference. One is fully alert, luminous. One is there witnessing, watching, but there is no cloud of thought. The sky is utterly empty: as far as you can see you cannot see any content.

Just being alive is such a gift, but nobody ever told you to be thankful to existence. On the contrary, everyone was grumpy, complaining. Naturally, if everything surrounding your life from the very beginning goes on pointing out to you that you are not what you should be, goes on giving you great ideals that you have to follow and you have to become, your isness is never praised. What is praised is your future - if you can become someone respectable, powerful, rich, intellectual, in some way famous, not just a nobody.

If you have difficulties making a decision, choose the lesser of the two evils.

We where created to discover Love - the only reality.

Doing brings ego. Ego is the shadow of action. And there is only one thing that is not doing and that is awareness, watchfulness. The only thing that is not part of the world of action is pure awareness. No shadow is created by pure awareness. It is so pure that light can pass through it - it is transparent and no shadow is created.

Meditation, witnessing, silently sitting and looking at the mind, will be of much help. Not forcing, simply sitting and looking. Not doing much, just watching as one watches birds flying in the sky. Just Lying down on the ground and watching, nothing to do, indifferent. Not your concern really, where they are going; they are going on their own.