Rajneesh Quotes

We have come into the world naked, and all the animals are naked, why should man hide his body behind clothes?

There are two kinds of witnesses. One kind is the people that surround you. You are constantly aware that you are being watched, witnessed. With so many eyes watching you, you are reduced to an object... And you are afraid because they may not appreciate you. They may not feed your ego, they may not like you, they may reject you. Now you are in their hands.

When love moves to the fifth center then whatever talents you have, any creative dimension, is possible for you. This is the center of creativity. It is not only for songs, not only for music; it is for all creativity.

Be - don't try to become. Being is enlightenment, becoming is ignorance.

Sannyas means dropping the fight with the river, going with the river, allowing the river to take you, learning the art of let-go. Those two small, simple words 'let', 'go', define the very spirit of sannyas. Then one can say 'Let thy kingdom come, thy will be done.' Then one withdraws one's will, and the moment you withdraw your will your life becomes immensely rich. Suddenly the whole is with you, and we can be victorious only when the whole is with us.

Meditation is the golden key to all the mysteries of life.

An expectation is a shelter - it gives you a security feeling. So when someone breaks your expectations he is breaking your shelter, making you insecure, fearful.

Compassion goes on giving, but knows no feeling of giving, knows no feeling that "I am the giver." And then existence goes on responding in thousands of ways. You give a little love and from everywhere love starts flowing. The man of compassion is not trying to snatch anything away, he is not greedy. He does not wait for the return, he goes on giving. He goes on getting too, but that is not in his mind.

My meditation techniques ARE dangerous. In fact there cannot be any meditation techniques which are not dangerous. If they are not dangerous, they are not meditation techniques, they are tricks. Just like Transcendental Meditation of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. They are mental tricks. Just consolatory. No danger. At the most they can give you good sleep, that's all. If you miss, you don't miss anything, you remain the same. If you attain, you attain to good sleep, that's all. No danger involved.

Meditation is enough. Everything else follows on its own.

For that, one has to drop all the masks, one has to risk many things, particularly respectability. That is a bribe by the society. It will give you a Nobel prize and it will give you many honours; it will do everything to make you feel great, if you can fulfil one condition: if you are obedient, obedient like a robot, then all respect is for you. Then the society will make you a great hero, but there will be no grace, no beauty, no freedom, no truth, no being; you have committed a real suicide.

Belief is in ignorance. If you know, you know. And it is good that if you don’t know, know that you don’t know — the belief can deceive you. The belief can create an atmosphere in your mind, where, without knowing, you start thinking that you know. Belief is not trust, and the more strongly you say that you believe totally, the more you are afraid of the doubt within you.

When there is no mind, you are in yoga; when there is mind you are not in yoga. So you may do all the postures, but if the mind goes on functioning, if you go on thinking, you are not in yoga. Yoga is the state of no-mind. If you can be without the mind without doing any posture, you have become a perfect yogi. It has happened to many without doing any postures, and it has not happened to many who have been doing postures for many lives.

The inner emptiness is the door to God.

In relationship with others, it is only you mirrored.

When you start meditating on your ego, on your thoughts, on your mind, you are suddenly separate, because whatsoever you meditate on, you are separate from it. That has become the object and you have become the subject.

Misery nourishes your ego - that's why you see so many miserable people in the world. The basic, central point is the ego.

Look at the flowers-for no reason. It is simply unbelievable how happy flowers are.

When sex becomes conscious it is love, it is no longer lust. Love brings freedom, and lust simply creates prisons for you.

The serious person becomes handicapped, he creates barriers. He cannot dance, he cannot sing, he cannot celebrate. The very dimension of celebration disappears from his life. He becomes desert-like. And if you are a desert, you can go on thinking and pretending that you are religious but you are not.

The perfectionist is bound to be a neurotic, he cannot enjoy life, until he is perfect. And perfection as such never happens, it is not in the nature of things. Totality is possible, perfection is not possible.

Whatever you are doing, don't let past move your mind;don't let future disturb you. Because the past is no more, and the future is not yet.

Find ecstasy within yourself. It is not out there. It is in your innermost flowering. The one you are looking for is you.

Just remember one criterion: whatever you do should not be in the service of destruction, it should be in the service of creativity.

Don't choose. If you choose, you will be in the quagmire. Don't choose! A choiceless awareness is the goal. Just remain aloof; don't choose. The moment you choose, you have fallen into the trap of the world, or into the trap of the mind.

Man is always exploited through fear.

Marriage is not a natural phenomenon. It is artificial, arbitrary. And when it disappears you cannot do anything to bring it back. You can pretend, but that pretension makes you a hypocrite. And your pretension cannot deceive the woman, because she has known your love and the pretension cannot become the substitute. The only way is to separate - in friendship, because you have given each other so much.

You are angry, and you watch it. You are not just angry, a new element is introduced into it: you are watching it. And the miracle is that if you can watch anger, the anger disappears without being repressed.

Each individual`s way is going to be different. Never follow anybody. That is the greatest calamity that can happen to a man. Once you start following somebody else, you become a carbon copy. You become an imitation.

It is the deep urge to be one with the whole, the deep urge to dissolve I and thou into one unity. Love is that because we are separated from our own source, out of that separation the desire arises to fall back into the whole, to become one with it.

Freedom is a ladder: one side of the ladder reaches hell, the other side touches heaven. It is the same ladder; the choice is yours.

Always go with the river of life. Never try to go against the current, and never try to go faster than the river. Just move in absolute relaxation, so that each moment you are at home, at ease, at peace with existence.

The richer you are, the more worries you have - problems of security, future. Whatsoever you have, you have to hold it. You have to hold it against others because they are constantly watching for a right opportunity to take it back. Whatsoever you hold, you hold out of violence. And of course, if you have been violent then others can be violent to you. They are just waiting for the right moment. The richer you get, the more worries, more problems, more fears you have. Who bothers, if one is happy?

To me the greatest problem with humanity is that they don't know anything of meditation.

Everybody is afraid of death for the simple reason that we have not tasted of life yet. The man who knows what life is, is never afraid of death; he welcomes death. Whenever death comes he hugs death, he embraces death, he welcomes death, he receives death as a guest. To the man who has not known what life is, death is an enemy; and to the man who knows what life is, death is the ultimate crescendo of life.

Remember, until you become a buddha you have wasted your life. Buddhahood is your flowering, your fragrance. A tree is fulfilled when it blooms, and a man is fulfilled when he releases the fragrance of buddhahood, when he becomes luminous; then he comes to know who he is. In knowing that, all is known. In knowing that, God is known. In knowing that, truth is achieved - you become the truth, and truth liberates. Truth is freedom.

Humanity will never be religious unless all organized religions disappear and religion becomes an individual commitment towards existence.

The miserable person is easily enslaved.The cheerful person,the blissful person,cannot be enslaved.

Life is happiness and unhappiness. Life is day and night, life is life and death. You have to be aware of both.

Be a giver. Share whatsoever you can. And remember, I am not making any distinction between. small things and great things. If you can smile whole-heartedly, hold somebody's hand and smile, then it is a creative act, a great creative act. Just embrace somebody to your heart and you are creative. Just look with loving eyes at somebody; just a loving look can change the whole world of a person.

Beware of dreams! And watch your dreams day in, day out, because they are continuously there. You can watch them, and by watching them you will become unidentified with them, you will become a mirror reflecting them. And this brings great freedom. Freedom from dreams is freedom from the world.

Wherever desire exists ego exists, and wherever ego exists illusion exists because ego is the greatest illusion there is. Even in a beggar who has nothing else you will find the same ego as you will find in Alexander the Great, because desiring is the same. Alexander the Great may have much money and much power, that does not matter; he is still desiring. The beggar may not have anything, but he is also desiring.

You have to be reminded of a basic fact: intelligence belongs to the watching consciousness; memory belongs to the mind. Memory is one thing - memory is not intelligence. But the whole of humanity has been deceived for centuries and told indirectly that the memory is intelligence. Your schools, your colleges, your universities are not trying to find your intelligence; they are trying to find out who is capable of memorizing more. And now we know perfectly well that memory is a mechanical thing. A computer can have memory, but a computer cannot have intelligence.

Mind is memory, not intelligence.

There is only one courage and that is the courage to go on dying to the past, not to collect it, not to accumulate it, not to cling to it. We all cling to the past and because we cling to the past we become unavailable to the present.

Be aware, and wine becomes water. Be aware - sex becomes love. Be aware - love becomes prayer. Be aware - prayer becomes meditation. Simply one thing has to be remembered: do whatsoever you like, but do it with full consciousness, and then you will not go astray.

Your politicians, priests, parents, they all are guilt-creators, because that is the only way that you can be controlled and manipulated. A very simple, but very cunning trick to manipulate you. They have condemned you, because if you are accepted, not condemned - loved, appreciated, and if it is relayed to you from everywhere that you are okay - then it will be difficult to control you. How to control a person who is absolutely okay? The very problem doesn`t arise.

If you try too much to change the outside, that shows that you are still attached. If a man tries to be detached, it shows attachment. Why bother about detachment if you are not attached? If a man escapes from women, it shows that sex is still the obsession. Otherwise, why escape from women if you are not obsessed?