Rajneesh Quotes

#1. Only a man of inner silences becomes a creator. And we need more and more creative people in the world. Their very creativity, their very silence, their very love, their very peace will be the only way to protect this beautiful planet.

Rajneesh

#2. Love respects the other. It is a give-and-take relationship. Love enjoys giving, and love enjoys taking. It is a sharing, it is a communication. Both are equal in love; in a sexual relationship both are not equal. Love has a totally different beauty to it.

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#3. The other world is hidden in this world. The Buddha is asleep in the Zorba. It has to be awakened. And nobody can awaken you except life itself.

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#4. Any action in which you can be total becomes meditation.

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#5. First you will feel your inner transformation in your outer relationships, and then you will go deep. Then only will you begin to feel something inner. But we have a settled attitude about ourselves. We don't want to look into relationship at all, because then the naked face comes up.

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#6. Don't try to force anything. Let life be a deep let-go. God opens millions of flowers everyday without forcing their buds

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

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#8. Surrender means seeing that "I am not separate" - just SEEING that "I am not separate." Nothing is surrendered, nothing is dropped; just a nonsense idea, a dream is no more there because you are awake.

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#9. Anywhere everywhere! Anything anyhow! just dance!

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#10. Sometimes happiness comes, sometimes sadness, anger, jealousy - you need not make them your problems

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#11. Transcendence means going beyond duality. Attachment means remaining within duality.

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

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#13. If this is understood then things become very clear. Misery makes you special. Happiness is a universal phenomenon, there is nothing special about it.

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#14. When desiring ceases, the other world opens. The other world is hidden in this world. But because your eyes are full of desire, full of the ego, you cannot see it.

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#15. Wisdom happens through meditation, and bliss also happens through meditation. Both the flowers bloom on the same branch.

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#16. Don't move the way fear makes you move. Move the way love makes you move. Move the way joy makes you move.

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#17. Listening means forgetting yourself completely - only then can you listen.

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#18. 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.

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#19. The total absence of desire brings happiness. It also brings freedom and liberation, because whenever something is lacking there are both limits and dependency. Only when nothing at all is lacking is there the possibility of total freedom. Freedom brings happiness. And happiness is salvation.

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#20. That is the ultimate synthesis - when Zorba becomes a Buddha. I am trying to create here not Zorba the Greek but Zorba the Buddha.

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#21. My meditation is a method of being aware - of whatever you are doing, thinking, feeling.

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#22. 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.

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#23. 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.

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#24. To be creative is to worship. To be creative is to participate in the great process of creation - and participating in creativity is participating in God.

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#25. Ambition is violence, the very effort to succeed in the world is violent.

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#26. Creativity is a quality that we give to every activity that we do.

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#27. The body sleeps, the heart sleeps, the mind sleeps - but you remain alert because you are nothing else but alertness. Everything else is a false identification. Awareness is your nature. The body is your abode. The mind is your computer. Awareness;s you, is your very being.

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#28. Your mind is a constant traffic of thoughts, and it is always rush hour, day in, day out. Meditation means to watch the movement of thoughts in the mind.

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#29. Zen is non-serious. Zen has a tremendous sense of humor. No other religion has evolved so much that it can have that sense of humor.

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#30. Drop the idea that attachment and love are one thing. They are enemies. It is attachment that destroys all love.

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#31. Pray with your woman, sing with your woman, play with your woman, dance with your woman, with no idea of sex.

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#32. Mind cannot think without duality. Duality is the way of thinking. In silence, all dualities disappear.

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#33. Only man has become an outsider - and because of his own efforts. On his own, he has separated himself from existence.

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#34. Expectations always lead to frustrations. Expectations are the seeds, and frustration is the crop that sooner or later you will have to reap. It is your own doing.

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#35. Rajneeshism is creating a Noah's Ark of consciousness, remaining centered exactly in the middle of the cyclone. You can only escape within, and that's 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.

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#36. The West has made people too time-conscious, not knowing where they are going but speeding to get there because time is short.

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#37. Just as the day cannot exist without the night, just as life cannot exist without death, creativity cannot exist without silence. And vice versa is also true: silence cannot exist without creativity.

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#38. It is beautiful that there are three hundred religions in the world; more are needed ... Each person should have his own religion - there should be as many religions as there are people!

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#39. Only disciplined people become free, but their discipline is not obedience to others: their discipline is obedience to their own inner voice. And they are ready to risk anything for it.

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#40. To be spontaneous means not to act out of the past, because out of the past is all cunningness, cleverness, calculation, arithmetic.

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#41. As you are now you are just a liquid phenomenon, changing every moment, nothing stable. Really you cannot claim any "I"
you don't have one. You are many "I"s just in a flow, a riverlike flow. You are a crowd, not an individual yet. But meditation can make you an individual.

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#42. To be aflame with silence, with joy, is wisdom. It is not through logic but through love. It is not through words but through a wordless state called meditation or a state of no-mind, satori, samadhi.

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#43. Meditation cannot be taught, it can only be caught. I am meditation. If you are available you can catch it.

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#44. The whole blame goes to the parents. They have lived as ambitious beings; they have destroyed themselves. Now they go on giving their heritage to their children - their unfulfilled desires, their incomplete ambitions. In this way diseases pass on from one generation to another.

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#45. Love needs two things: it has to be rooted in freedom and it has to know the art of trust.

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#46. Love is ultimate, the highest health, because love makes one whole. When you love a master by and by you completely forgot about love.

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#47. You have to drop all your defenses, only then is intimacy possible. We are all hiding a thousand and on things, not only from others but from ourselves.

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#48. This word 'individual' is beautiful; it means indivisible. Right now as you are, you are divided. You are only many fragments clinging together anyhow without any center being there, without any master in the house, with only servants. And for a moment any servant can become the master.

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#49. Those who remain content easily remain small: small are their joys, small are their ecstasies, small are their silences, small is their being. But there is no need! This smallness is your own imposition upon your freedom, upon your unlimited possibilities, upon your unlimited potential.

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#50. Anger will come and go and the watcher abides. Sadness comes and passes by and the witness remains

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#51. To remain absolutely free is what a true and authentic life is. So never gather any character - remain characterless.

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#52. The world is against individuality. It is against your being just your natural self. It wants you just to be a robot, and because you have agreed to be a robot you are in trouble. You are not a robot.

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#53. Remember: whatsoever I am saying is not the thing that I want to say to you. Whatsoever I am saying has nothing to do with truth, because truth cannot be said. Whatsoever I am saying is nothing but a hammering. If you become awake, you will see the truth.

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#54. Life in itself is so beautiful that to ask the question of the meaning of life is simply nonsense.

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#55. 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.

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#56. Zen is a kind of unlearning. It teaches you how to drop that which you have learned, how to become unskillful again, how to become a child again, how to start existing without mind again, how to be here without any mind.

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#57. 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.

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#58. Seriousness is a sickness ... Existense is pure playfulness

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#59. One has to reach to the absolute state of awareness: that is Zen. You cannot do it every morning for a few minutes or for half an hour and then forget all about it. It has to become like your heartbeat. You have to sit in it, you have to walk in it. Yes, you have even to sleep in it.

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#60. If you love money and you want to be creative, you cannot become creative. The very ambition for money is going to destroy your creativity. If you want fame, then forget about creativity. Fame comes easier if you are destructive.

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#61. Without any fight, just being a witness, mind disappears.

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#62. Comparison is a very foolish attitude, because each person is unique and incomparable. Once this understanding settles in you, jealousy disappears.

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#63. Worship the Silent Space in you.

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#64. Creativity is secondary, meditation is basic and fundamental; everything should come out of your meditation. Then it will give you a beatitude, your being a new song, and it will help others to experience something of it. It will depend on their meditativeness.

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#65. When you listen with perfect awareness, then listening becomes possible.

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#66. Being is so significant that it is irreplaceable. You are just yourself. Do something that comes out of you - not to assert, but to express! Sing your song, dance your dance, rejoice in being whatever nature has chosen you to be.

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#67. To be present is to be prayerful.

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#68. Unless a man learns how to create, he never becomes a part of existence, which is constantly creative. By being creative one becomes divine; creativity is the only prayer.

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#69. Never be ashamed of your tears. Be proud that you are still natural. Be proud that you can express the inexpressible through your tears.

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#70. Yesterday you were thinking about today because then it was tomorrow; now it is today and you are thinking about tomorrow, and when the tomorrow comes, it will become today- because anything that exists, exists here and now, it cannot exist otherwise.

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#71. The secret of meditation is the art of unlearning. Mind is learning; meditation is unlearning: that is - die constantly to your experience; let it not imprison you; experience becomes a dead weight in the living and flowing, riverlike consciousness.

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#72. The disciple is not hankering for knowledge; he wants to see, not to know. He wants to be. He is no longer interested in having more knowledge; he wants to have more being.

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#73. Existence does not listen to your desires, and does not follow your desires, however beautiful and however pious. Existence goes on in its own way.

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#74. If you suffer it is because of you, if you feel blissful it is because of you. Nobody else is responsible - only you and you alone. You are your hell and your heaven too.

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#75. Let sannyas be the turning point. That's what sannyas is all about: a return journey. One starts moving inwards rather than moving outwards.

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#76. Wherever you go, your mind will go with you. Your knowledge will go with you, your prejudices will go with you, your scriptures will go with you. Your idea that you are a Hindu or a Mohammedan will go with you. So what are you renouncing?

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#77. If somebody asks, "What is a dance?" how can you define it? But you can dance and you can know the inner feel of it.

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#78. When you are in the present without thinking, you are for the first time spiritual.

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#79. Awareness means you come with an inner light, you move fully alert. Each step is taken in awareness - the walking, the coming, the sitting - everything is done in full awareness.

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#80. There is no failure in life. It all depends how you take things. If you are desiring too much - you want to reach too high, and you cannot - then there is frustration and failure. But if you are not desiring anything and you are perfectly happy wherever you are, life is moment-to-moment victory.

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#81. 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.

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#82. I want my people to understand that because only man is capable to laugh, that means laughter is the highest point of consciousness, the highest point of understanding, the highest point of evolution. That's why I have started calling laughter "the prayer time."

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#83. Creativity itself is divine. Creativity itself is godliness.

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#84. If the mind wants to comprehend reality, it will have to come out of the past and the future. But coming out of the past and the future, it is no longer the mind at all. Hence the insistence of all the great masters of the world that the door to reality is no-mind.

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#85. The more mind is filled with chattering, more sex has appeal.

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#86. 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.

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#87. Drop all ideas of achieving in meditation, just do it naturally; what happens happens on its own. One day, effortlessly, everything starts happening by itself.

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#88. Nature has come to a point where now, unless you take individual responsibility, you cannot grow.

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#89. From birth to death man is a long sleep, sometimes dreaming with eyes closed, sometimes dreaming with eyes open, but dreaming all the same, all the time.

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#90. Transform your sex into love, and transform your love into prayer

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#91. 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.

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#92. "Never speak of me in the past tense". My presence here will be many times greater without the burden of my tortured body.

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#93. 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.

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#94. Learn to become more of a witness, create more watchfulness. Let each act, each thought, be seen.

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#95. But Jesus has been depicted as a serious man. And Christians say he never laughed. Then what is the function of an Enlightened man? If Jesus cannot laugh, then who is going to laugh in this world?

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#96. Meditation is not doing anything directly to your violence, not doing anything to your jealousy, to your hate. It
is simply brining light into your house, and the darkness disappears.

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#97. I am the rich man's guru.

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#98. Never feel lonely. You are never lonely. At the deepest core of your being, God resides.

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#99. Awareness is an inner quality of consciousness; it has nothing to do with closed or open eyes.

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#100. My religion is a religion of sharing, not of following

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