Rajneesh Quotations

Don't avoid extremes, and don't choose any one extreme. Remain available to both the polarities - that is the art, the secret of balancing.

All of the religions are looking after the poor. At least leave me alone to look after the rich. I am the rich man's guru.

Because of the womb being a central phenomenon in the feminine body, the whole psychology of woman differs: she is non-aggressive, non-inquiring, non-questioning, non-doubting, because all of those things are part of aggression. She will not take the initiative; she simply waits - and she can wait infinitely.

What I am teaching is religiousness, a quality. Religion is a dead dogma, fixed principles, frozen fossils. What I am teaching to you is a living, flowing religiousness - an experience like love.

My people. I have given them a sense of individuality, integrity. I have not made them slaves of any god or any religion. Nor of any holy book or any priest. I have certainly not replaced their god. They are all a part of what I call my traveling circus.

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

When you become a sannyasin, I initiate you into freedom, and into nothing else... I am destroying your ideologies, creeds, cults, dogmas, and I am not replacing them with anything else.

A man has a birthright to be tired and retired. I am retired completely.

There is no god, so how can I consider myself a god? God is the greatest lie invented by man.

I am going to be contradictory to myself many times for the simple reason that I am trying to bring all the religions to a higher synthesis. Different approaches have to be joined together. I am creating an orchestra.

My house was a guest house of many Jaina saints, Hindu monks, Sufi mystics, because my grandfather was interested in all of these people.

Rajneeshism is creating a Noahs Ark of consciousness, remaining centered exactly in the middle of the cyclone. You can only escape within, and thats what I teach. I do not teach worship of God or any other ritual but only a scientific way of coming to your innermost core.

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.

I don't think existence wants you to be serious. I have not seen a serious tree. I have not seen a serious bird. I have not seen a serious sunrise. I have not seen a serious starry night. It seems they are all laughing in their own ways, dancing in their own ways. We may not understand it, but there is a subtle feeling that the whole existence is a celebration.

It may be just one facet of your personality, or it may not even be a facet but only a pretension. You can show this false face with no problem when sometimes you meet on a sea beach, sometimes in a garden, sometimes under the moon and the stars, but when you really start living together then the reality starts surfacing. The real person is a hell and all that sweet talk that had happened under the stars becomes just lies.

In the West, marriage is collapsing because it is based on love. And a marriage that is based on love is bound to fail. There is a reason for this: whenever two persons fall in love, both of them present what is beautiful in themselves to the other and hide the ugly. When you fall in love, whether you are a man or a woman, you show your most beautiful face to the other - but it is not your reality, it is not your totality.

Life as such has to be taken as a cosmic joke - and then suddenly you relax because there is nothing to be tense about. And in that very relaxation something starts changing in you - a radical change, a transformation - and the small things of life starts having new meaning, new significance. One learns only one thing, how to rejoice in life.

Bring individuality into things, do not just be an imitator. To imitate is to miss life.

Nobody is here to fulfill your dream. Everybody is here to fulfill his own destiny, his own reality.

There have been only two taboos in the world: sex and death. It is very strange why sex and death have been the two taboos not to be talked about, to be avoided. They are deeply connected. Sex represents life because all life arises out of sex, and death represents the end. And both have been taboo - don't talk about sex and don't talk about death.

To live in relationship and yet remain independent, that is what courage is.

Belief is a deception you play upon yourself....

In dreams the mind is constantly giving you substitutes just to protect sleep. And the same is happening while you are awake. The mind is giving you substitutes just to protect your sanity; otherwise you will be scattered in fragments.

Beyond mind, there is an awareness that is intrinsic, that is not given to you by the outside, and is not an idea - and there is no experiment up to now that has found any center in the brain which corresponds to awareness.

I'm simply saying that there is a way to be sane. I'm saying that you can get rid of all this insanity created by the past in you. Just by being a simple witness of your thought processes. It is simply sitting silently, witnessing the thoughts, passing before you. Just witnessing, not interfering not even judging, because the moment you judge you have lost the pure witness.

One moment it was there, another moment it is gone. One moment we are here, and another moment we have gone. And for this simple moment, how much fuss we make! How much violence, ambition, struggle, conflict, anger, hatred, just for this small moment! Just waiting for the train in a waiting room on a station, and creating so much fuss: fighting, hurting each other, trying to possess, trying to boss, trying to dominate - all that politics. And then the train comes and you are gone forever.

Any human being who is becoming independent of conditionings, of religions, scriptures, prophets and messiahs, has arrived home. He has found the treasure which was hidden in his own being.

Pleasure is a sort of oblivion, a forgetfulness. Pain is remembrance, you cannot forget pain.

Don't be bothered by perfection. Replace the word 'Perfection' by 'Totality. Totality will give you a different dimension.

Your real being only flowers with unconditional love. Ambition is against love. Anything that is against love is against you and your real life.

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.

That which is lived becomes divine and that which is not lived bcms devil.

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

Anywhere everywhere! Anything anyhow! just dance!

When your ego is no more, only then will you know who you are.

Bravery does not mean being fearless. It means to be full of fear but still not being dominated by it.

In relationship with others, it is only you mirrored.

If you love yourself, you love others. If you hate yourself, you hate others.

If whatsoever you have been living can be conveyed by words, that means you have not lived at all.

Heaven and hell are not geographical; they are not something outside you, they are something that belongs to your interiority. If you are awake, then you are in a totally different universe; it is as if in your awakening the whole existence becomes awakened. It takes a new color, a new flavor, a new fragrance. When you are asleep, the whole existence sleeps with you. It all depends on you.

Hell and heaven are within you, both gates are within you. When you are behaving unconsciously there is the gate of hell; when you become alert and conscious, there is the gate of heaven.

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.

Heaven and hell are not geographical. If you go in search of them you will never find them anywhere. They are within you, they are psychological. The mind is heaven, the mind is hell, and the mind has the capacity to become either. But people go on thinking everything is somewhere outside. We always go on looking for everything outside because to be inwards is very difficult. We are outgoing. If somebody says there is a god, we look at the sky. Somewhere, sitting there, will be the divine person.

Whatever you are doing, if there is contentment and a feeling that this whole existence is nothing but the manifestation of godliness, that we are traveling on holy earth, that whomever you are meeting, you are meeting God - there is no other way; only faces are different, but the inner reality is the same - all your tensions will disappear. And the energy that is involved in tensions will start becoming your grace, your beauty.

There is no other revolution except consciousness. It cuts the desires from the very roots and it brings freedom to you.

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

Never follow anybody else`s idea - that is very dangerous because you will become imitative. Always follow your own nature, self-nature; only then will you attain to freedom. It is better to die following one`s nature than to live following somebody`s else`s nature, because that will be a pseudo life. To die following one`s nature is beautiful, because that death too will be authentic.

Don`t allow the fear to overpower you, allow love to overpower you. Love comes from the center, fear always comes from the periphery; don`t allow this periphery to be dominant. And what have you got to lose? Even if there is no rebirth - there is rebirth - but I say even if there is no rebirth and you simply die, what have you got to lose? What will be lost?

The first thing to be understood: effort is needed, but effort alone is not enough - effort and then effortlessness, effort plus effortlessness. Effort precedes, and then effortlessness follows. Effortlessness is the peak of effort, it comes only when you have reached the peak

First you have to do all that you can do, and then you have to learn non-doing. The doing of the non-doing is the greatest doing, and the effort of effortlessness is the greatest effort.

With effort, reach to effortlessness. With seeking, reach to a state of no-seeking. With mind, arrive at no-mind.

The whole zen attitude is to bring to your notice the fact that there is no effort to be made. The zen attitude is that of effortlessness.

If you come to a really religious man you will feel a grace around him, effortless. He has not done anything to himself, he has simply relaxed into the ultimate, and you feel the effortlessness around him.

You will have to learn ways of relaxing in the present. Enlightenment is not an effort to achieve something. It is a state of effortlessness. It is a state of no-action. It is a state of tremendous passivity, receptivity. You are not doing anything, you are not thinking anything, you are not planning for anything, you are not doing yoga exercises, and you are not doing any technique, any method - you are simply existing, just existing. And in that very moment... the sudden realization that all is as it should be. That`s what enlightenment is!

Unless you come out of your mind and become a no-mind you will not know what life is all about, you will live in vain. You will not have your honeymoon, it is impossible. You will not know the sweetness that existence is full of and the ecstasy.

Awareness, beholding the mind, is the most essential method to have a breakthrough. And once you have gone just a step beyond the mind, you have entered the world of nirvana, you have entered the world of light and eternal life. You have attained to spiritual integrity, freedom, and tremendous ecstasy which the mind cannot even dream about.

As the witnessing deepens, you start becoming drunk with the divine. This is what is called ecstasy.

Meditation is the art of living with yourself. It is nothing else than that, simply that: the art of being joyously alone. A meditator can sit joyously alone for months, for years. He does not hanker for the other, because his own inner ecstasy is so much, is so overpowering, that who bothers about the other?

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 to attain to a no-mindness, to a state of no-thought. In that opening of no-thought, in that kind of space, suddenly you become pure, innocent, uncorrupted. You have never been like that before nobody has ever been like that before nobody is going to be like that again. Unique. And to know that is to realize one's self. To know that is to know all. If you have not known that, whatsoever else you know is just rubbish, garbage.

Real music will help you move towards meditation, beyond the mind needs, towards spiritual needs. Real poetry will give you a glimpse of the minds of the sages - a glimpse of course. It will open a window so you can see the faraway distant Himalayas. And then an urge arises in you, and you start travelling.

If you meditate, meditation is so beautiful, who bothers about the result? And if you bother about the result, meditation is not possible. This result oriented mind is the only barrier, the only block. There are not many blocks, the only block is that of the result oriented mind: never here-now, always somewhere else thinking of the result; while making love, thinking about the result.

If you were only to listen, it becomes meditation. Without meditation you cannot hear. What is the meaning of meditation? Meditation exists only where mind is not; where the internal dialogue is gone.

Only one thing is going to remain with you: that is your witnessing, that is your watchfulness. This watchfulness is meditation.

Zen lives in the present. The Whole teaching is: how to be in the present; how to get out of the past which is no more and how not to get involved in the future which is not yet, and just to be rooted, centered, in that which is.

I believe that the very effort to convert anybody is violence, it is interfering in his individuality, in his uniqueness, into his freedom.

If your creativity comes out of your silence, out of your Zen, out of your meditations, then it is authentic, original. If it comes only as an occupation because you are feeling lost and there is nothing to do - a long holiday, so you start doing something... That is not coming out of your silences, it is coming out of your crazy mind.

If you become more sensitive to beauty, to poetry, that means your love has blossomed. And all the energy that has been left by fear, anger and hate, will be taken over by your love, your sensitivity, your compassion, your creativity. This is the whole alchemy of changing base metals into gold.

If you are silent through meditation, utterly silent, suddenly you feel a tremendous urge to create something.

Humanity needs a new soil - the soil of freedom. Bohemianism was a reaction, a necessary reaction, but if my vision succeeds then there will be no bohemianism because there will be no so-called collective mind trying to dominate people. Then everybody will be at ease with himself. Of course, you have not to interfere with anybody, but as far as your life is concerned you have to live it on your own terms. Then only is there creativity. Creativity is the fragrance of individual freedom.

Help people to meditate, because there is nothing more creative than meditation. Each art and each creativity can be tremendously enhanced by meditation. If somebody is a painter and he starts meditating, his painting will have a sudden jump, it will become tremendously profound - because whatsoever you paint reflects your mind. If the mind goes deeper, your painting will go deeper. You paint your mind. What else can you paint? You paint yourself.

God is not a person but creativity, not a creator but creativity.

God is not repetitive; His creativity is infinite.

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.

Creativity is always from the beyond.

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.

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.

If you live with alertness, you live rightly. If you live in imitation, you live wrongly. To me there is only one sin: And that is not to be yourself. And to me there is only one virtue: And that is to know yourself.

The characteristic of the first sort of religion is imitation. It insists on imitation: imitate Buddha, imitate Christ, imitate Mahavir, but imitate. Imitate somebody. Don`t be yourself, be somebody else. And if you are very stubborn you can force yourself to be somebody else. You will never be somebody else. Deep down you cannot be. You will remain yourself, but you can force so much that you almost start looking like somebody else.

Don`t be imitators. The mind is an imitator, because it is easier to play the game of imitation than to become authentically true. Many ideas have been given to you: become like a Buddha, become like Jesus. become like Krishna - as if you have to become everybody else EXCEPT yourself. As if God is only against you. He`s for Krishna, for Christ, for Mahavir, for Buddha - only against you. Then why does He create you? Then He seems simply foolish. Why does He go on creating you? If He`s interested in Buddha, Hc can create Buddhas. Why you?

If you try to become a buddha, one thing is certain - you will not be able to become yourself. One thing only is certain - that you will not be yourself. And then follows the next thing: you can never be a buddha, because you are you and a buddha is buddha. If you try to become a buddha, you cannot be a buddha; at the most you can be an imitation - a plastic flower, not a real rose.

Never imitate. The mind is an imitator, because imitation is very easy. To be someone is very difficult. To become someone is very easy - all that you need is to be a hypocrite, which is not much of a problem. Deep down you remain the same, but on the surface you go on painting yourself according to some image.

Imitation is very easy, and the whole culture and society depends on imitation. Everybody is telling you how to behave, and whatsoever they are teaching you is nothing but imitation. Religious people - the so-called religious people, the priests, the theologians - they are also teaching you, `Be like Jesus, be like Buddha, be like Krishna.` Nobody ever tells you, `Just be yourself` - nobody. Everybody is against you, it seems. Nobody allows you to be yourself, nobody gives you any freedom. You can be in this world, but you must imitate somebody.

Don`t imitate. If you want to know who you are, please avoid imitation, that`s a way of avoiding knowing yourself.

The real religion is not imitation of anybody else, it is a search to find out your own authentic self, who you are.

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

Don`t imitate: imitation creates falsity, pseudo-ness, inauthenticity. Just feel your own way and don`t bother about what others say. It is nobody else`s business. Don`t bother about what churches say, organizations say - listen to your own heart.

Ordinarily, even when people become religious, they go on thinking in terms of having - possessing heaven or possessing the pleasures of heaven - but still they go on thinking in terms of having. Their heaven is nothing but their projected desire of having everything. All that they have missed here they would like to have in the after-life. But it is the same desire.

There is no greater enjoyment than that of sharing something. Have you given something to somebody? That`s why people enjoy giving gifts so much. It is a sheer delight. When you give something to somebody - maybe valueless, may not be of much value - but just the way, just the gesture that you give, satisfies tremendously. Just think of a person whose whole life is a gift! whose every moment is a sharing - he lives in heaven. There is no other heaven than that.

Heaven and hell are not very distant, they are neighbors; only a small fence divides them. You can jump that fence, even without a gate. You go on jumping from this to that. In the morning you may be in heaven; by evening you are in hell. This moment heaven, that moment hell. It is just an attitude, just a state of your mind, just how you are feeling. Many times, in a single life, you may visit hell, and many times you may visit heaven. In a single day also...

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.

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.

Meditation should not be a thing apart from life; it should be amidst life, it should be a part of life an organic part, nothing 'put separate'. The temple should exist exactly in the middle of the market, and all distinctions between the sacred and the secular should be dissolved.

Real music will make you more and more refined. It will become more and more silent. In fact, real music will help you to listen to silence, where all notes disappear, where only gaps remain. One note comes, disappears, and another has not come, and there is a gap. In that gap meditation flows in you.

Meditation is unfocussed mind, you simply listen silently, not with a tension in the mind, not with an urge to know and learn, no, with total relaxedness, in a let go, in an opening of your being. You listen, not to know, you simply listen to understand.

The West is concentration of the mind: the East is meditation of the mind. The West is thinking: the East is non-thinking. The West is mind: the East is no-mind.

It is better not to call anything to anybody - just remain centered in yourself. Look at the world and drop judgments, and you will have such a pure atmosphere around you - no appreciation, no condemnation, just a pure watchfulness. This watchfulness, I call meditation.

In fact everything can become a sort of meditation, because in everything there are two dimensions - just as there are in the first breath: the outer and the inner.

One man has discovered that by running there is no need to meditate, just by running meditation happens. He must be absolutely body oriented. Nobody has ever thought that by running meditation is possible - but I know, I used to love running myself. It happens. If you go on running, if you run fast, thinking stops, because thinking cannot possibly continue when you are running very fast. For thinking an easy chair is needed, that's why we call thinkers armchair philosophers; they sit and relax in a chair, the body completely relaxed, then the whole energy moves into the mind.

To live moment to moment is the life of meditation. Then life becomes spontaneous without any effort; then nobody can make you miserable, nobody can disappoint you, nobody can make you a failure because in the first place you were not trying to be a success; you were not asking the future to be in a certain way. So whatever happens, the next moment you can rejoice. It is always your victory.