Rajneesh Quotes

Law is for the society; love is for the individual. Law is how you behave with others; love is how you behave with yourself. Love is an inner flowering; law is an outward performance. Because you live with people you have to be lawful, but that is not enough - good, but not enough.

Because we cling to the past we become unavailable to the present.

Learn to laugh. Seriousness is a sin, and it is a disease. Laughter has tremendous beauty, a lightness. It will bring lightness to you, and it will give you wings to fly.

It was good of Friedrich Nietzsche to declare God dead - I declare that he has never been born. It is a created fiction, an invention, not a discovery. Do you understand the difference between invention and discovery? A discovery is about truth, an invention is manufactured by you. It is man-manufactured fiction.

Belief is a deception you play upon yourself.

A man of knowing attains to a sense of humour. Let this always be remembered. If you see someone who has no sense of humour, know well that that man has not known at all. If you come across a serious man, then you can be certain that he is a pretender. Knowing brings sincerity but all seriousness disappears. Knowing brings a playfulness; knowing brings a sense of humour. The sense of humour is a must.

Vegetarianism is a conscious effort, a deliberate effort, to get out of the heaviness that keeps you tethered to the earth so that you can fly - so that the flight from the alone to the alone becomes possible.

In reality, everything is within; the outer is just a projection. Fear is within you; it is projected as a hell. Hell is just a projected image on the screen - of the fear that is within you, of the anger, of the jealousy, of all that is poisonous in you, of all that is evil in you. Heaven is, again, a projected image on the screen - of all that is good and beautiful, of all that is blissful within you.

Somebody insults you and you feel anger. Don't miss this opportunity; try to understand why, why this anger. And don't make it a philosophical thing. Don't go to the library to consult about anger. Anger is happening to you -- it is an experience, a live experience. Focus your whole attention on it and try to understand why it is happening to you. It is not a philosophical problem. No Freud is to be consulted about it. There is no need! It is just foolish to consult somebody else while anger is happening to you. You can touch it. You can taste it. You will be burned by it.

Because of jealousy you are in constant suffering; you become mean to others. And because of jealousy you start becoming phony, because you start pretending. You start pretending things that you don't have, you start pretending things which you CAN'T have, which are not natural to you. You become more and more artificial. Imitating others, competing with others, what else can you do? If somebody has something and you don't have it, and you don't have a natural possibility of having it, the only way is to have some cheap substitute for it.

The same is the case when you enter a womb, enter into a fresh body, and start the journey of desires. But if you die alert, in that alertness not only the body dies, all desires evaporate. Then there is no entering into a womb. Then entering a womb is such a painful process, it is so painful that consciously you cannot do it; only unconsciously you can do it.

Meditation has only one meaning, and that is going beyond the mind and becoming a witness. In your witnessing is the miracle - the whole mystery of life

The world is not religious because religion is imposed upon us. The parents are in a hurry to impose; the church, the state, the country - everybody is in a hurry to impose a certain religion on the child. How foolish! How stupid! Religion needs maturity, great understanding, before one can choose.

Lao Tzu says: "Accept yourself. Non-acceptance is the root of all the trouble." None of us accept ourselves. The more a person doesn't accept himself, the greater a mahatma he looks to others to be. We are our greatest enemy. If we had our way, we would cut ourselves to pieces in order to remove what was unacceptable.

Small children smoking, and the mother is not aware that it is because the breast has been taken away. In all primitive communities a seven-year-old child, or even an eight or nine-year-old child, will continue breast-feeding. Then there is a satisfaction and smoking will not be so necessary. That's why in primitive communities men are not so much interested in women's breasts; there is no problem that somebody will attack them. Nobody looks at the breasts.

In meditation, once you are gone in, you are gone in. Then, even when you resurrect you are a totally different person. The old personality is nowhere to be found. You have to start your life again from abc. You have to learn everything with fresh eyes, with a totally new heart. That's why meditation creates fear.

Choice is bondage, choicelessness freedom. The moment you choose something, you have fallen in the trap of the world. If you can resist the temptation to choose, if you can remain choicelessly aware, the trap disappears on its own accord, because when you don`t choose you don`t help the trap to be there - the trap is also created by your choice.

All duality is a mind creation, all duality is created by the clinging and attached mind. When there is no attachment there is no duality.

Learn to be more meditative, and let your creativity be secondary to your meditativeness. Then you will have a totally different state of being - that of ecstasy; and out of ecstasy, whatever is created has also some flavor of it.

It is within your hands to be frustrated in life or not. Just your expectations should become smaller, smaller, smaller, and in the same proportion the frustration will become smaller. A day will come when there will be no expectation; then you will never come across any frustration.

Here, start living moment to moment totally and intensely, joyfully and playfully — and you will see that nothing goes out of control; that your intelligence becomes sharper; that you become younger; that your love becomes deeper. And when you go out into the world, wherever you go, spread life, playfulness, joy, as far away as possible — to every nook and corner of the earth.

Time is a need of the miserable mind. Time is a creation of misery. If you are happy there is no time - time disappears.

Future arises out of your misery, not out of your celebration. A really celebrating person has no future; he lives this moment, he lives it totally. Out of that total living arises the next moment, but it is not out of any lust. Of course, when out of celebration the next moment arises, it has more capacity to bless you. When out of celebration the future arises, it goes on becoming more and more rich. And a moment comes when the moment is so total, so whole, that time completely disappears.

Marriage has failed because you could not rise to the standard that you were expecting of marriage, of the concept of marriage. You were brutal, you were, you were full of jealousies, you were full of lust; you had never known really what love is. In the name of love, you tried everything which is just the opposite of love: possessiveness, domination, power.

My whole teaching consists of two words, meditation and love.

Sadness is silent, it is yours. It is coming because you are alone. It is giving you a chance to go deeper into your aloneness. Rather than jumping from one shallow happiness to another shallow happiness and wasting your life, it is better to use sadness as a means for meditation. Witness it. It is a friend! It opens the door of your eternal aloneness.

In pure awareness the mind cannot drag you down into the mud, into the gutter. In anger, in hatred, in jealousy, the mind is absolutely impotent in the face of awareness. And because the mind is absolutely impotent, your whole being is in a profound silence - the peace that passeth understanding.

Go inwards. Find your inner space, and suddenly, you will find an explosion of light, of beauty, of ecstasy -as if suddenly thousands of roses have blossomed within you and you are full of their fragrance.

Enlightenment is the understanding that this is all, that this is perfect, that this is it. Enlightenment is not an achievement, it is an understanding that there is nothing to achieve, nowhere to go.

The present gives you the opportunity to dive deep into the water of life, or to fly high into the sky of life. But on both the sides there are dangers - 'past' and ´future´ are the most dangerous words in human language.

Millions of people have tried meditation and dropped out of it because they took it very seriously. Religion has been thought to be a very serious affair - it is not. One has to understand - at least those who are with me - that religion is a playfulness, a laughter. Take it easy; then things blossom without any tension. You are not taking it easy, you are making it difficult.

Create inner freedom through witnessing. Sannyas is only for the inner freedom. And live out of inner freedom.

You will come closer and closer to perfection, but you will never be perfect. Perfection is not the way of existence. Growth is the way.

Whenever you meditate, there are glimpses. Then the mind comes in and says, 'Be happy! Look, I have done it.' And immediately the contact is lost.

Ego brings unnatural desires in you; it drives you crazy. Life is simple, but to be simple one has to be purposeless. Any goal, and you can`t be simple. Any goal and you can`t be herenow. Any goal and the desire will rock you. Any goal, and you are on the way, again moving - you cannot enjoy this moment, the grace of this moment, the benediction of herenow.

Wakefulness is the only saintliness there is, and sleepiness, unconsciousness, is the only sin there is; all other sins are born out of it. Cut the root, cut the very root! Don't go on pruning the leaves.

This is going to be a hard task for you, first to attain and then to lose - because you can lose only something which you possess. If you don't possess it, how can you lose it?

If you can love death you become deathless; if you can understand non-being then your being becomes the very ground of being-hood, the very ground of God. If you can love non-being then nothing can destroy you, you have transcended time and space. Then you have become one with the total, and this is what holiness is - to become whole is to be holy.

Everything can become a meditation if you live it totally and intensely. And then your life becomes whole.

Love is life, love is god, love is sannyas!

It cannot be called freedom, a freedom which can choose only the right and not the wrong; then that is not freedom.

People go on postponing everything that is meaningful. Tomorrow they will laugh; today, money has to be gathered... more money, more power, more things, more gadgets. Tomorrow they will love - today there is no time. But tomorrow never comes, and one day they find themselves burdened with all kinds of gadgets, burdened with money. They have come to the top of the ladder - and there is nowhere to go except to jump in a lake.

If you meditate, sooner or later you will come upon love. If you meditate deeply, sooner or later you will start feeling a tremendous love arising in you that you have never known before.

Take life easily, lovingly, playfully, non-seriously. Seriousness is a disease, the greatest disease of the soul and playfulness the greatest health.

If you become silent after your laughter, one day you will hear God also laughing, you will hear the whole existence laughing - trees and stones and stars with you.

Moving from love, not fear - a beautiful idea, especially when applied literally to the body.

I teach contentment. And the basic principle of contentment is to drop your ego. Don`t think for a single moment, "To be or not to be." Just not to be is the rule. What have you gained by trying to be? Just for a change try not to be, and you will be amazed. The moment you are not, there is contentment, there is silence, there is beauty, there is bliss. Meditation is only a methodology to make you aware that your only disease is your ego, and your only health is egolessness.

Advice is like food, and teaching is a menu.